Land Is a Painted Thing, The

About Carrie Bennett

Carrie Bennett is the author of biography of water (winner of the 2004 Washington Prize), and several chapbooks from Dancing Girl Press—The Quiet Winter, Animals in Pretty Cages, and The Affair Fragments—and Expedition Notes, an ephemera book from Letter [r] Press. She holds an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellow, and teaches writing at Boston University.

Praise for The Land Is a Painted Thing

Carrie Bennett’s The Land Is a Painted Thing is a captivating narrative presented in prose poems by a clear-spoken first-person. In the mode of science fiction, the story is at first disorienting, but by degrees the transplant factory feels familiar. Awful and fascinating. Transplant yourself here.
—Kimiko Hahn, Judge, and author of Brain Fever

Carrie Bennett’s The Land Is a Painted Thing provides a directive for reading: “…No longer know your own names.” Set in a post-human landscape, in poems dominated by the proscriptive syntax of the sentence, the job of the dis-membered workers in the “Transplant Factory” is to “bury [our] eyes deep in a drawer,” 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 (“Grief Primer”), 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. Read it and weep.
—Claudia Keelan, author of O, Heart

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. 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. Apply liberally wherever necessary.
—Cole Swensen, author of Gravesend