Self-Portrait with Crayon [Paperback]

Allison White (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

It's rare to find a book of poetry that makes a reader remember why one reads poetry, but Allison Benis White has written one. --Boston Review

How do these poems do what they do? Degas-rich, fear-rich, memory-rich, the tone of the book feels beautiful and rendered while simultaneously impulsive and storming...I can't get this book out of my head. --The Kenyon Review

I fell for these prose poems the moment I started to read them, and I liked them even more once I figured out their donnee...you could take her best sentences and print them separately as individual poems. --Stephen Burt, Rain Taxi

Allison Benis White's Self-Portrait with Crayon reaffirms the lyric poem's potential for rendering the impact of traumatic loss nearly visible. --H_NGM_N

"A fugitive mother haunts these prose poems where absences are presences that 'briefly in the air crown the shape of what is no longer there.' Although Degas -- another motherless child -- provides conceptual armature for Allison Benis White's portrayals, this book might be A Season in Hell for our times. Its descents, sudden and disorienting, exert enormous pressure; there's a narcosis of the depths in the voice, a refusal of return to mere surfaces that echoes Rimbaud. Yet White's poems are also intimate as a box of pins -- bright sharps she pricks into the map of orphan-world, to mark each site of betrayal and bewilderment." --Robert Hill Long, author of The Work of the Bow and The Effigies

"An oblique conversation with Degas reigns throughout this collection of oddly heartbreaking pieces. Against the backdrop of his paintings and sketches, we find ourselves in an intimate world, coherent but uncanny, where private memory becomes inseparable from the culture we hold in common, and all of it just barely cracked open, riven by interstices through which we glimpse the vivid but unsayable. White has given us a truly exceptional first collection, deeply musical and intricately haunting." --Cole Swensen, author of Ours and The Book of a Hundred Hands

"I found myself thinking of Frost as I read these beautifully disturbing poems -- 'The whole great enterprise of life, of the world, the great enterprise of our race, is our penetration into matter, deeper and deeper, carrying the spirit deeper into matter.' Allison Benis White does just that, pulsing between a childlike wonder at the things of this world, and a seemingly hard-earned self-consciousness at the difficulty in naming them -- in these poems a mother is missing, a God is to be feared, the snow is broken, and yet, 'maybe this is enough: to lose.' This is an amazing debut." --Nick Flynn, author of Some Ether and Blind Huber

About the Author

Allison Benis White's poems have won such awards as the Indiana Review Poetry Prize and a Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers. Her second poetry manuscript, "Small Porcelain Head" received the James D. Phelan Literary Award for a work-in-progress from the San Francisco Foundation. Her poems have appeared in such journals as The American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, Ploughshares and Pleiades. She teaches at the University of California, Irvine.

Product Details

• Paperback: 63 pages
• Publisher: Cleveland State University Poetry Center; 1st Ed. edition (March 2, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1880834839
• ISBN-13: 978-1880834831
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.9 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,111,130 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Allison Benis White is the author of Self-Portrait with Crayon, winner of the CSU Poetry Center First Book Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, and Ploughshares, among other journals. Her honors include the Indiana Review Poetry Prize, the Bernice Slote Award from Prairie Schooner, and a Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers. She is currently at work on a second manuscript, "Small Porcelain Head," which received the James D. Phelan Award for a work-in-progress from The San Francisco Foundation.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best New Poet In A Long Time, March 2, 2009

By 

Kelly Belmar - See all my reviews

This review is from: Self-Portrait with Crayon (Paperback)

I have an earlier version of this book when it was still called Curtainfall and still coming up as a runner-up or not at all in the contests. At the time, I was struggling to write painfully narrative prose poems for a professor who thought there was no such thing as a poem in prose. Curtainfall then offered me a sense of permission, a sense of possibility for poems beyond the confines of my workshops. But Allison's poems weren't experimental, new age junk either---while the line danced around in pleasingly surprising ways, it was grounded by a careful, loving instinct for what's always made great art: going after the heart of the heart, the searing white center of what it means to be human. These poems are brave and vulnerable while maintaining an essential kindness. It's Allison's empathy for our rawest parts, for the various ways we fail one another and our ourselves, that leads this collection through our competing desires with our dignity intact.

I reread this collection again this morning and found my breath still catching on poems I've carried across the country in four different moves. You only get a few of these in a lifetime, the books that make you feel alive and less alone and flooded with excitement because it IS enough just to get it down right. Just to say it. To bear witness to the dark and quiet folds of our ordinary lives. I love this book the way some people might a fancy car or a small child, and I could gush about it for a long time. But mostly, what I want to say is thank god that someone is around to write like this.

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Book, November 11, 2011

By 

Osiris - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Self-Portrait with Crayon (Paperback)

This book is what drove me to begin trying prose poetry. White is amazing. She also came to campus and I got her to sign my book. It is currently one of my favorite poetry books. As long as you can appreciate literature, you will like at least some of the poems in this collection.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Cutbank Review of Allison Benis White's _Self-Portrait with Crayon_, October 9, 2009

By 

Kathryn Stevenson (Inland Empire, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Self-Portrait with Crayon (Paperback)

Above all, Allison Benis White's collection of poems _Self-Portrait with Crayon_ teaches us the simple, unforgettable maxim: pain is reach.

The collection begins with what is gone: "The hidden are alone too. I crouched in the closet, between my mother's skirts and shoes, where the legs should be" (5). Without a body, clothes outline lack, their shapes marking boundaries between body and disembodiment: "The shoulders are the span of the hanger and the mind is the hook which suspends the entire dress" (5). The image of the mind reduced to a hook does not speak of pain, but we get it.

Here, the thing gestures toward an idea, a non-thing, one cannot otherwise hold. In this sense, the thing--a closet, a dress, a hanger--allows connection, a sudden narrative snap: "People lose their minds and leave in the middle of cooking salmon" (5). This reach--the move to connect loss to a moment, a kitchen, the smell of a pink-bodied fish--rises from the compulsion to anchor ourselves in the material world, ground ourselves in the sediment of objects, and attach to some small, real thing before we are capable of consolation: "I will tell you something quietly: we tried to send her a birthday card, but it was returned, wrong address. It is common to know very little, if anything" (5).

A salmon dinner, a birthday card, a wrong address--these are the cold, hard things that punch, punctuating our otherwise amorphous and mass-less despair. Yet they are the details that allow us to articulate and imagine--here, though, sketch--what is otherwise unspeakable and unimaginable. White knows grief calls on us to represent loss in the details, to perceive boundaries between the ordinary and extraordinary, to sketch rather than bullet, to reject chronology, to begin in the middle, and, yet to tell anyway, to narrate and discern and forge universals out of abstraction, to find yet another thing that might, finally, point at what to do next or what to avoid or what, simply, to accept: "People exist for as long as possible until it is too difficult to matter" (5).

On its own, the collection's first poem "From Degas' Sketchbook" offers the image of how difficult it is for a girl hidden in her mother's closet to matter to someone gone and, simultaneously, how difficult for a mother "to matter"--both in the sense of being worthy or recognized worthy and in the sense of materializing, coming into being to embody the articles that, to a closeted, crouched child represent lack. Somehow, at once, a mother mothers as long as she can, and a daughter recalls her until it is too painful or too cumbersome even to conjure her in images, to bring back someone gone. Here, grief is a central interior impulse that reaches out, like the motion of a hand drawn to touch something untouchable before it retracts, repelled.

Together, the poems in Self-Portrait with Crayon are a study in mourning and melancholia, a grammatology of sadness--one which outlines the features of despair, the rules of mourning, and the shape of our efforts to live through it.

Despair, White understands, opens eyes to the things before us with an urgency that shackles us to images that might have otherwise been fleeting, like a cruel time machine in which there is no travel, only the unending awareness of time and an acute sense that past, present, and future are tidy, irrelevant categories that mislead, distract, and relieve those not mourning. Like this: "If I press my hand against the window, no one will die sooner or reverse directions" (8). Or this: "Before I was born, my dog buried a plastic frog in the side yard when one of her female puppies died--she needed somewhere" (9). We are not safe from what already came or what has yet to come; any minute we might feel every loss all at once--and not just our own, but through ours, we'll feel the loss of others as well. And so we must attach loss, freeze it, give it "somewhere."

From White's poems, readers can glean recognizable, patterned responses to loss; mourning forces our focus on the particulars, for instance--which is to say that people mourning know what is not nothing: "I want to reach things I can keep" (54). Like wounded dogs, they need objects--to attach, to express themselves, to project meaning onto, to represent--as if to re-imagine or retool or redesign the shape of the interior, driving, unsettled mind.

People mourning outline impressions even as they suffer imprint: "When there is nothing left, everything is possible" (26). Or, perhaps it is that they deal with imprint by outlining impressions, as if to cast imprint off. In "Interior of the Rape," for instance, White's cutting characterization of human bonding is so sharply resonant it is, one moment, beautiful: "I will not let you sleep follows the pattern of most affection"; a step later, though, she tugs at the pattern's brutality instead: "This is the feeling of a leash at the base of your neck" (25).

People mourning grasp for universals among the particulars: "We will live as long as we have someone to tell" (26). The reach for human patterns is the effort to seek solace in the omnipresence of pain, to find dull, pain-diffusing, trauma-abating normalcy in suffering--like this: "It is common to rock the sick in your arms. It is common to rearrange the body into a comfortable position" (23). And this: "It would be unnatural to place the arms at the sides, torso unprotected" (23).

Understanding fear overcomes us, White sometimes offers the patterns as instruction: "when you enter someone else's room, it is important to whisper her name before you touch her, so she knows you are approaching, and does not become alarmed" and "If someone breaks into your house at night, my father advised, pretend you are dead" (28; 24). Here, advice exposes everyone--those who might break in, those who fear them, those who cannot do more than recommend we play dead. Readers sense White does not endorse an action more than she scorns our resignation to fear--ambivalently, though, while representing the lives of people who live by it.

People mourning consider what will be gone soon: "Whether we miss less what we know will disappear, I am tired of seeing" and "A sponge attached to a hand which is attached to an arm. Which is crucial. Anxiety thrives on the unknown. If her hand took the sponge away, there would be a cool empty spot on the child's neck" (41). The move to reflect on what is here now but soon might not be is an exercise in taking the part away from the whole so that one might imagine another scenario and thus come to know the unknown--to treat anxiety with anticipation, essentially. Lives marked by a history of hard times know leaning on the cool-headed expectation that the worst is coming makes life better now. Because it means we will be less anxious and more prepared.

In "Horse with Jockey," someone points "to an X-ray of his chest," saying, "The human heart is an apple," and someone else asks, "But what shape or comfort can I make with my mind?" _Self-Portrait with Crayon_ is one.