The Land Is a Painted Thing

Poetry. Science Fiction. Environmental Studies. Lyrical sci-fi prose poems evoke a future where we have forgotten the details of our current world, yet retain the instincts for beauty and the natural world that might save us.

Says Claudia Keelan, Set in a post-human landscape, in poems dominated by the proscriptive syntax of the sentence, the job of the dis-membered workers is to proceed, disconnecting from body and the words that proscribed singularity, to automaton. Directed by voices from myriad loudspeakers away from the words that defined their humanism, the remnant people in this apocalyptic second collection still look for connection to the derogated earth, dreaming 'our legs were fields of poppies, ' still 'tell the land we pray for it every night.' This is a book whose method is its warning.

Cole Swensen adds, Sharply chiseled prose blocks build into a world insidiously sinister and delicately haunting, a world built of details accruing an eerie chorus. But amid an atmosphere of slow-motion terror, there is also hope--because there is agency. There is a 'we, ' and we have a plan. And we have a map. Bennett has given us a finely tuned emotional primer for dark times.