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