Carrie Bennett
Newest Book
The Mouth Is Also a Compass by Carrie Bennett “breaks open the sea” and takes us on a daring expedition to the natural world that transports and transforms all of us. These feminist poems of apocalyptic adventure insist on seeking and surviving. They are meticulously rendered and filled with unpredictable images of odd and alluring intimacy. Elegant and stunning!— NATHALIE HANDAL, CONTEST JUDGE
“I prepare to leave / my vanishing glacier,” the speaker tells us as she embarks Shackleton–like on an expedition, using language like an ice ax, feeling her way, inscape to landscape, to a place where there are “[l]ight crystals big as a shadow box, moonlit apple-green.” The journey is archetypal, radical, and elegiac; her only companion a wolf, the only outcome a slow-moving apocalypse. “I can walk, I can’t leave nice straight lines,” she writes, as the poems, many in the form of last entries from an explorer’s log, terrify, and transform and heighten, the grandeur and danger around her. Piercing lyricism.Inventive form. What a fierce and fearsome book!— JOAN HOULIHAN
More Books
"In Lost Letters and Other Animals Carrie Bennett explores what words can and cannot express. Animals abound--birds sing and stop singing, dogs breathe and stop breathing, deer appear and disappear. All along the human brain box records, remembers, and then forgets. In five long
fragmented poems, we put together a collage that is a meditation on the eternal tension between beauty and truth. Bennett's touch is light but cuts deeply into the impermanence that marks our lives. A beautiful collection."
-Barbara Hamby
"Gradually and inevitably, these sharply chiseled prose blocks build into a world insidiously sinister and delicately haunting, a world built of details--mouths, poppies, snow--that loop back through, accruing an eerie chorus."
-Cole Swensen
"Bennett's book length poem biography of water chronicles a body's return to its gaze in the world. Here biography is not a linear account of events and experiences but rather a reflection of the gaze of a self in dissolution [...] The language here is never unfamiliar or strained yet some of the most complicated exploration of the loss of self occurs in this extended poem." -Claudia Rankine
Recent Publications
Menagerie Magazine (April 10, 2023)
Mom Egg Review Vol. 21 (2023)
Posit (Spring 2023)
Pangyrus (September 28, 2021)
bee house journal (winter 2021)
The Indianapolis Review (Winter Issue 2020)
Bio
Carrie Bennett is the author of four books of poetry, most recently The Mouth Is Also a Compass, winner of the 2023 Barrow Street Poetry Prize. Her other books include Lost Letters and Other Animals (Black Lawrence Press, 2021); The Land Is a Painted Thing, selected by Kimiko Hahn for the Hilary Tham Capital Collection (The Word Works, 2016); biography of water, winner of the 2004 Washington Prize (The Word Works, 2005); and several chapbooks from dancing girl press: The Affair Fragments, Animals in Pretty Cages, The Quiet Winter, and 22 Acts of Resistance. After earning her MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writer's Workshop, she began teaching at Boston University. She lives in Somerville, MA with her family.