Allison Benis White, Self-Portrait With Crayon

There are books to read quickly and forget about. There are others to linger over the first time you read them and the second, third, tenth. Books that you carry with you and learn to love in new ways each time you come back to them. Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays and Amy Bloom's A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You are my big loves in fiction and I could trace their sentences in the dark. As for poetry, there are many individual poems I carry around as big loves though few as entire collections. But Allison Benis White's Self-Portrait with Crayon gathers up a rare and lovely achievement: poem after poem worthy of a lifetime of lingering. The book comes out in about two weeks and I'm not above heckling people to buy it.

I have an earlier version of the manuscript when it was still called Curtainfall and still coming up as a runner-up or not at all in the contests. At the time, I was struggling to write painfully narrative prose poems for a professor who fancied himself lyrical and who thought there was no such thing as a poem in prose. Curtainfall then offered me a sense of permission, a sense of possibility for poems beyond the confines of my workshops. But Allison's poems weren't experimental, new age shit either—-while the line danced around in pleasingly surprising ways, it was grounded by a careful, loving instinct for what's always made great art: going after the heart of the heart, the searing white center of what it means to be human. These poems are brave and vulnerable while maintaining an essential kindness. It's Allison's empathy for our rawest parts, for the various ways we fail one another and our ourselves, that leads this collection through our competing desires with our dignity intact.

I reread this collection again this morning and found my breath still catching on poems I've carried across the country in four different moves. You only get a few of these in a lifetime, the books that make you feel alive and less alone and flooded with excitement because it IS enough just to get it down right. Just to say it. To bear witness to the dark and quiet folds of our ordinary lives. I love this book the way some people might a fancy car or a small child, and I could gush about it for a long time. But mostly, what I want to say is thank fucking god that someone is around to write like this.


The Dance Examination

My mother wore a small black hat to her father’s funeral, but this is private. She was a child. He was never to be mentioned again. Therefore the story is brief and somewhat fictional. Often children are not allowed at a hospital or funeral. My grandmother burned his clothes, his shoes in the incinerator. Now we can dress him however we choose and forever. When there is nothing left, everything is possible. Like a drawing of heaven or the yellow room where the dancers will be judged.

Everyday has led up to this movement and her body could not remember how to invite the shape of the turn. We will live as long as we have someone to tell. After the burial, my mother warned her younger brother he would turn black if he did not go to bed. Smearing his cheeks with shoe polish, she turned him toward the mirror. It is already happening. All stories persist to explain the end. I will try and fail again. The way a child fails to suppress a smile when she lies, crossing out her mouth with both hands.