(Made) (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781897388563)

These prose poems / juxtaposing the individual / intertwine / objects and occurrences repeatedly / a cosmological chronology / inhabits. Why /narrative tension / mention / barbed wire / pieces accumulate / Rather than a direct or linear / of the universe this / These / references to certain / prose poems / repeatedly / if altered / time it indicates / a filled space / that which surrounds it.

In the magical dictionary of (made), Cara Benson renders hotel facades in "marshmallow" ï 1/2 not a color, but the surface ï 1/2 a substance I associate, at least in North America, with outdoor recreational fires. That hotel is going to burn to a crisp, in the social and planetary imaginary of Benson's intense work. What's particularly successful about this collection is the fact that ï 1/2this projective, impossible, ruined image ï 1/2does not have a place in the book, but, rather, appears/can appear: in the body of the reader: reading. Images are tracked not just for their futures but for their past versions ("garbage") - in which we "wander, but delete, too." "How can you aim a fire?", asks Benson, in the "cold axis" of an aftermath in which the earth is an "orange" orbiting or attracting the "jagged spark lines" of the sky. What breaks the sky? This is writing from the holocene. It's not trajectory. It's not narrative. It's vibration. - Bhanu Kapil