Bøger af Ben Estes

Poetry. What exactly is an illustrated game of patience? Imagine something like group solitaire within a room full of objects, Duchamp on a TV, some great old albums, voices from a radio or the past, and a set of reverberating cymbals. In Ben Estes's ILLUSTRATED GAMES OF PATIENCE, the game involves sorting through objects and landscapes to reveal their soft hums of isolation, often in the wake of love. If there is winning involved, the rewards are hope for renewal and a faith in arranging. Filled with color and light, these poems make vivid the tender details of close observation, urging love to stretch and green. This beautiful work of late Romanticism finds Estes often roaming, sometimes making his bed in uncomfortable places, exemplifying patience, to which he at one point builds an actual broad-bodied monument. He is patient because he has the whole world and all of time at his disposal. The poems speak in riddles, impossible questions, vivid sensuous description, and, on one page, doggerel. Scent fetishists will appreciate the descriptions of crotch smells. In fact, there should be something here to satisfy hedonists of all stripes.--Aaron Kunin Ben Estes's poems, with their piquant accentuation and glorious measured sensuality, remind me a little of James Schuyler's. I also feel: bouquets not previously perceived, a style I can't fully attribute to the twentieth century or any previous. A strange new liberty quietly makes itself known.--Lucy Ives

Selection of journal entries culled from Charles Burchfield's journals: the poetry of place, published by SUNY Press, 1993.

"With mounting intensity extended across three sections of poems, Ben Estes' achingly personal second collection unfolds to reveal an uncertain past, present, and future that is by turns mysterious and beautiful."--

Thirty-Four Reverse Telescopes and Three Buttons catalogs the artist's recent body of colored Plexiglas works, made between 2013 and 2016, introduced obliquely with a poem by Ben Estes. Painter Matt Connors (born 1973) is known for combining a modernist visual vocabulary of grids and tense, minimal compositions with influences from design, poetry and music. Connors' recent series of works brings this sensibility into the play of media: paintings in acrylic on paper are mounted on colored matte board, framed behind colored Plexiglass, creating an effect of nested colored forms in space. Both objects and paintings, the deeply hued, mixed-media pieces have been reproduced in Thirty-Four Reverse Telescopes and Three Buttons in black and white as well as color, highlighting the works' complex tonality in addition to their dynamic coloration.