Poetry and Fiction
Bio
Ben Cartwright's work appears in The Pinch, DIAGRAM, West Branch, Seneca Review, and elsewhere. He welds sculptures for his garden, makes insect jewelry for other poets, and builds arcade cabinets made from recycled sewing machines. He once Skyped with Margaret Atwood after winning third place in the Atty Awards.
He is a professor at Spokane Falls Community College, and is currently working on a Children's Picture Book of univocalic poetry.
REVIEWS
Cartwright employs a certain muscularity and musicality. In fact, reading these poems I often felt myself teetering between extremes I recognize from actual life: energy/vitality/buoyancy vs. duty/stasis/entropy. The poems pace the long plank of these mental and emotional states, and even as we hover and balance near the fulcrum, we sense what's on either side, what looms, what awaits.
Nance Van Winckel,
author of Our Foreigner
Cartwright intimately interrogates connections of human to animal, native to foreign, and living to ghosts, consoling that 'Flesh' is the word we use for what is bitten through: fruit, animal, us.
Megan Kaminsky,
author of Deep City
The wild energy of creativity fills every page of Ben Cartwright's splendid first book. From the level of the image ('a hemorrhage of sumac') to pantoums packed with syntactical play, to motifs that bring reader and author together in the construction of epistemology ('Scissors Beats Paper's Your Matter of Opinion'), these poems dance with craft.
Elizabeth Dodd,
author of Horizon's Lens
Sample Works
"Out of Body's Your Matter of Opinion"
[POEM]
[POEM]
published in DIAGRAM
"Looney #1"
[HYBRID]
published in
The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts
My Dear Library
[PROSE POEM SERIES]
published on What She Might Think
"1964"
[PROSE POEM]
published in DMQ Review
"Newton's First Copy of Euclid"
[POEM]
published in Stone Telling
"Spring kinks its shiv"
[POEM]
published in Parcel and on Versedaily
"Africa" and "Crematorium"
[COLLABORATION with Lindsey Merrell]
published in Duende
"Terraforming Mars"
[POEM]
published in Abyss & Apex and nominated for the Rhysling Award
"Sewing Lesson"
[POEM]
published in Pontoon Poetry
"Humans Taken Hostage in Dog Park"
[PROSE POEM]
published in
Pontoon Poetry
"Nesting Song"
[POEM]
published in Pontoon Poetry
"Ad Hoc Hurricane Correspondent"
[FICTION]
published in Johnny America
Books to purchase
(select a cover for more information/to add it to your cart)
CONTACT
For inquiries, events, collaborations, and misadventure: