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
