Benjamin Krusling’s nuanced graphical grammar is ecstatic in its quiet powers, and its scaffold of structural freedom finds tender affinity with the work’s overarching action—experimental reportage on explorations of an expansive interior landscape cracked open with softness. Throughout—heralding interiority and form—are a flickering bouquet parade of the unpaired insisting on their wholeness as is, insisting on their celebration as self. The work is ripe with fracturing’s urgency to show the ways of new wholeness, and blackness shines everywhere like slivers of light.

It is alarming to find what you are looking for, which is what I have found in the work of Ben Krusling. His writing is sensitive, skittish, seems to have no proper skin; its unmediated effects are both intoxicating and mystifying, insofar as he appears to have no truck with literary fashions or forms. While the surface of the work is magical; the interior is confrontational and wise.

Glaring is a beautiful and powerful, brilliant collection, combining energies of various modernisms with elegant maneuverings through the bleak media of contemporary America. Concerned with institutions—race, health, school, sports, police, family, money, history—as well as the shifting fortunes of affection and the self, these poems utterly transform two other well-worn institutions: the lyric and the page.