paper • 72 pages • 17.95
ISBN: 978-1-961897-22-9
eISBN: 978-1-961897-23-6
March 2025 • Poetry
Named a Library Journal 2025 “Title to Watch”
“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.”
from Description of Symptoms
Lying on the floor tonight, snowflakes
cut from paper laid over my eyes, a hand
carved from wood laid over my mouth.
If the truth is the thing you must not say,
I will speak for the vase now
as it falls: it is better never
to be at all.
Allison Benis White’s A Magnificent Loneliness addresses the finitude of death in a style entirely her own. The third in a trilogy that includes The Wendys and Please Bury Me in This, A Magnificent Loneliness continues White’s combination of fragmentation and repetition. This constellating, akin to what Walter Benjamin calls “mimetic faculty,” results in repetitions while simultaneously introducing novelty and difference. If the three collections are a triptych, A Magnificent Loneliness is its triumphant end, which is also to say, a new beginning. As White writes, indicating the poem as garden, “I have come to the garden to say goodbye, to kneel before my subject.”
In A Magnificent Loneliness, Allison Benis White offers her signature lyricism and profundity to explore loss, grief, and the intricate dance between what we perceive and what remains hidden. Through her deft use of metonymy, White forms awe-inspiring connections across time, linking the past with the present, the visible with the unseen. This evocative book is a poignant, poetic meditation on the transformative power of sight and meaning—whether in a poem, a painting, or a human—to reveal a deep compassion for the lives we share and the complexities of our emotional terrain.
For White’s haunting, morphing lyrics encompass three pandemic-era losses noted in both dedication and the poet’s notes—two friends’ suicides and her mother-in-law’s passing from cancer—while a book of Monet’s paintings remains open on the table….Here “magnificent” is the scale of art and of grief and isolation, marked by their intersections.