when people move , I’m amazed
stupefied , dead
why the most pleasing invention is moving image
no word reminds me of womb life , good life
and the reactions of people nearby linking up
I just wanted to offer some sense of love and understanding
when I wanted to be needed , to hold somebody …
then they came to the door , said you look awful
It is alarming to find what you are looking for, which is what I have found in the work of [Benjamin] Krusling.
Simone White
It got so dark is a book about pleasure’s recession. “blacked out when I grabbed the chop//it got so dark” – Rio Da Yung OG, but dreaming might not stop when violence starts, or better not. That’s why the tone is so fried – it’s called trying to maintain.
Benjamin Krusling is the author of a chapbook GRAPES (Projective Industries) and a book, GLARING (Wendy’s Subway). Work has appeared in Folder Magazine, The Volta, Omniverse, Montez Press Radio, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn.
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.
Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves
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.
Simone White
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.
Lucy Ives
Chapbook
28 pp, 5.5 x 7.75 in
Publication Date: December 01 2022
Distribution: Asterism Books (US)