A Magnificent Loneliness

＂I remember // once, turning to leave, a black purse over her shoulder. . .＂ Oneiric and surreal as always, Allison Benis White attempts to mediate, if not make sense of, inconceivable bereavement in her fifth collection of poetry. ＂A black purse, / over her living shoulder, Love said nothing to me.＂

Ethereal, airy, and spare at once, A Magnificent Loneliness is a dialogue with ghosts. White, whose previous work won the Rilke Prize and the Four Way Books Levis Prize judged by Claudia Rankine, assembles these pages as an ekphrastic and epistolary record of her solitary journey through loss. These poems relate to artwork, the history of artistic practice, and inherited lore to broker an oblique and piecewise conversation concerning pain too vast to articulate all at once. ＂I don’t know how to love the world but to love / her leaving.＂ These lyrical iterations represent White’s attempts to comprehend the individual suffering of being alive, and to metabolize the grief of women’s epidemic disappearance, literal and spiritual, through sickness and despair. Through those efforts, she illuminates a magnificent loneliness--the privilege of being alive to our anguish, of missing someone dearly because someone dear existed--and a reason for not yet departing that struggle. ＂How to leave / the world but to turn to leave her-- / but to turn my head back / to see her.＂

Allison Benis White is the author of The Wendys, Please Bury Me in This, winner of the Rilke Prize, and Small Porcelain Head, selected by Claudia Rankine for the Levis Prize in Poetry. Her debut, Self-Portrait with Crayon, won the Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, Pushcart Prize XLI & XLVII: Best of the Small Presses, and elsewhere. She has received honors and awards from the Poetry Society of America, the San Francisco Foundation, and the Academy of American Poets. She teaches at the University of California, Riverside.