Sign up for the mailing list to know about when the novel Unside: A Book of Closed Time-Like Curves comes out.
The Cabinet of What You Don't See (ISMs Press)
Chapbook
"The Cabinet of What You Don't See by Tantra Bensko is a gem of infinite worth."
- Gary Budgen http://garybudgen.wordpress.com/
- Gary Budgen http://garybudgen.wordpress.com/
Review
". . . in the glints, which are surreal not in the way of existing in a loosely defined reality, but warped by the force of the telling, even in their smallness, the warmth of Tantra's voice pervades, and each outrageous observation is borne of a wisdom that comes from love, which is totally inimitable." at http://www.witf.org/books-authors/2012/07/on-chapbooks-part-two.php
Kari Larsen, author - Say you're a fiction (Dancing Girl,) and the Black Telephone (Unthinkable Creatures)
Kari Larsen, author - Say you're a fiction (Dancing Girl,) and the Black Telephone (Unthinkable Creatures)
Joyous Mayhem
I love your book so muchly much! Funny sad spooky familiar deep scary pretty delicious beauty like dreams and nightmares I had before or made up after I woke up trying to to reremember what I thought I couldn't remember from dreams I couldn't forget in point of fact. You are a gifted so lucid awakener of dreamy stories. More than i can say. You write what i want to read. And how I muse. How else can i say how much i am loving reading your Cabinet?!?! I am delighted by your brilliant writing. I LOVE your Cabinet. LOVE LOVE LOVE it! Delightful dreamy goodness and oxygen replenishment for my spirit neurons. Cabinet of What You Don't See is joyous mayhem. There should be a warning label on it."
Peter Johnstone, Giants in the Earth
Peter Johnstone, Giants in the Earth
Delicious
I find all your work deliciously entertaining. I love the way your brain works. I remain a fan! Blessings--Laura Benedict, Surreal South editor, Press 53
Watching the Windows Sleep (Naissance Press)
Read "Crow Reviews" by Lynn Alexander.
B.L. Kennedy, in Belinda Subraman's Gypsy Art Show recommends it:
"not simply because of the quality of the writing, but because of the fluid innovative sense of language that Tantra Bensko displays. This small chapbook of 51 pages is hands down one of the best collections of short prose that I have had the opportunity to encounter in the past year. . . .
Watching the Windows Sleep is sure to seduce the reader in its lyrical, whimsical surrealism. Here is a book by a young writer that I think can stand as an example for many other writers. So if you have the chance to hunt down a copy of Watching the Windows Sleep by Tantra Bensko, I would do so as soon as possible. This little book is just an absolute treat, and will leave many a reader asking for more of this author’s fabulous voice."
excerpt from
Watching the Windows Sleep in Colliope Nerve Reviewed by Kyle Muntz
"Watching the Windows Sleep isn’t simply about dreams—it’s an exploration of the unconscious and its integration with the things we perceive, utilizing language in gentle, elaborate waves, like a series of momentary imprints, one replacing another as they wash against the shore. Reality (if such a thing can even be said to exist in the text) becomes a point of departure, around which Bensko weaves a tapestry of images, until the distinction between what is and is not becomes meaningless, and all that remains is a sense of “having experienced”, in an almost blissful sense.
For the most part, these stories are difficult, if not possible to summarize. All feature fantastic, surreal elements that very interesting and unique in themselves; these narratives run through the interior of the pieces without ever rising to the surface, so the reading experience itself remains quintessentially nonlinear. Each sentence makes us realize that the possibilities are limitless—and we begin to wonder, after a while, why we ever thought they weren’t. . . . .
The text has a lush sense of peaceful ambiance that I really like as well, a striving towards something nameless, abstract, and beautiful. The text is also accompanied by a series of images, which do an excellent job accenting the stories; the overall sense is of a vision coalescing, always taking different shapes, but never settling on one entirely.
The different shapes mean much on their own, but when they are intertwined in these steps, the patterns of the green exchanging with each other, they make more sense to each other… When the ancestors fly over, if they ever do, they may not understand it. But it is not for them. It is for the shapes themselves…The shapes of dying, the shapes of living. They weave together like singers on a boat. The shapes of water itself, the shapes of shattering oneself forever. The shapes of going out through a window and never coming back through it, but walking through a door instead, incomprehensibly.
Altogether, this brief collection is made up of a handful of short stories with one poem at the beginning and end. Each piece, though, is rich enough to be read over many times, and taken together they form a kind of mind-space, unfamiliar, deeply textured, and on occasion a little erotic as well. This is the kind of work, of course, that seeks to expand our understanding of narrative, or perhaps renovate it entirely. . . ."
_From the Alabama Writers Forum, by Bebe Barefoot:
Tantra Bensko describes her work as “experimental literary fiction that looks behind the eyelids,” but to anchor yourself as you join her on a journey through the universe of the sub-conscious, you need only look behind her name.
“Tantra,” or tantric practice, aligns microcosm with macrocosm and makes the ordinary the transportation of choice for reaching an extraordinary that was always already there. Like her experimental forefather, William Blake, Bensko sees “…the world in a grain of sand / and heaven in a wildflower.”
Watching the Windows Sleep consists of six fictions and two poems, the latter being bookends that moderate by both containing and explaining the wild heart pounding between. This expository tendency paradoxically threads its way through the dreamlike tapestry Bensko weaves. Even while the content explodes our expectations of “story,” an age-old literary device—allegory—provides form that hearkens tradition, both ancient and not-so. Think of it as Plato’s cave morphing into Lewis Carroll’s looking glass.
Two lines in the middle of the book (page 25) encapsulate one idea Bensko explores allegorically throughout these pieces:
“The old ways of looking at things are seeming so outdated. You feel sorry for those who are still trapped with them. Whatever those ways were.”
This passage comes from an unidentified narrator in “The Quantum Fool,” the third fiction in the chapbook, but could just as easily be spoken by a yellow-suited chap in “The Accidental Voyeur,” the collection’s first story. That poor fellow’s encounter with a condescending waiter at the “most expensive restaurant in Europe” seems like a surrealistic morality play illustrating every misunderstood artist’s or writer’s frustration with rules and form. In solidarity and perhaps also empathy, “The Boy Who’s a Floating Flower” sings the praises of play and experimentation:
“You have to know what story you’re in before you can get out. The storyteller sometimes likes to just be. Outside of pretending there’s time.”
Time both stands still and circles back and swallows itself in “The Terrace Steps.” A dead grandfather joins his family at the dinner table, and his widow, both aging and dead, talks to birds as easily as she bequeaths a muffin recipe. This fiction follows “The Accidental Voyeur,” which ends with our yellow-suited friend curling his lips “so far backwards they entered his throat and pulled in the whole scene of the restaurant with them,” a vivid conclusion that simultaneously serves as a lead-in to the musing upon time as uroboros.
The opening poem, “Non-Containers,” uses a cracked bowl to allegorize the universe or perhaps reality, priming the reader for enlightenment: “The light / That shows / Between the cracks.” The poem at the other end of this literary microcosm weaves the cracked pieces into a mosaic and reminds us that “The bench we sit on / Is in every flower / With the whole / Scene inside.” The bowl cracks again and Blake’s grain of sand becomes Bensko’s bench, birthing yet another mosaic. Nov. 2011
Bebe Barefoot is a freelance writer who lives and teaches in Tuscaloosa.
Tantra Bensko describes her work as “experimental literary fiction that looks behind the eyelids,” but to anchor yourself as you join her on a journey through the universe of the sub-conscious, you need only look behind her name.
“Tantra,” or tantric practice, aligns microcosm with macrocosm and makes the ordinary the transportation of choice for reaching an extraordinary that was always already there. Like her experimental forefather, William Blake, Bensko sees “…the world in a grain of sand / and heaven in a wildflower.”
Watching the Windows Sleep consists of six fictions and two poems, the latter being bookends that moderate by both containing and explaining the wild heart pounding between. This expository tendency paradoxically threads its way through the dreamlike tapestry Bensko weaves. Even while the content explodes our expectations of “story,” an age-old literary device—allegory—provides form that hearkens tradition, both ancient and not-so. Think of it as Plato’s cave morphing into Lewis Carroll’s looking glass.
Two lines in the middle of the book (page 25) encapsulate one idea Bensko explores allegorically throughout these pieces:
“The old ways of looking at things are seeming so outdated. You feel sorry for those who are still trapped with them. Whatever those ways were.”
This passage comes from an unidentified narrator in “The Quantum Fool,” the third fiction in the chapbook, but could just as easily be spoken by a yellow-suited chap in “The Accidental Voyeur,” the collection’s first story. That poor fellow’s encounter with a condescending waiter at the “most expensive restaurant in Europe” seems like a surrealistic morality play illustrating every misunderstood artist’s or writer’s frustration with rules and form. In solidarity and perhaps also empathy, “The Boy Who’s a Floating Flower” sings the praises of play and experimentation:
“You have to know what story you’re in before you can get out. The storyteller sometimes likes to just be. Outside of pretending there’s time.”
Time both stands still and circles back and swallows itself in “The Terrace Steps.” A dead grandfather joins his family at the dinner table, and his widow, both aging and dead, talks to birds as easily as she bequeaths a muffin recipe. This fiction follows “The Accidental Voyeur,” which ends with our yellow-suited friend curling his lips “so far backwards they entered his throat and pulled in the whole scene of the restaurant with them,” a vivid conclusion that simultaneously serves as a lead-in to the musing upon time as uroboros.
The opening poem, “Non-Containers,” uses a cracked bowl to allegorize the universe or perhaps reality, priming the reader for enlightenment: “The light / That shows / Between the cracks.” The poem at the other end of this literary microcosm weaves the cracked pieces into a mosaic and reminds us that “The bench we sit on / Is in every flower / With the whole / Scene inside.” The bowl cracks again and Blake’s grain of sand becomes Bensko’s bench, birthing yet another mosaic. Nov. 2011
Bebe Barefoot is a freelance writer who lives and teaches in Tuscaloosa.
Swinging on the Edge of Day (Naissance Press)
Richard Hugo's Use of Sound in Relation to Content in his Poetry
This is a 150 page literary analysis of interest to passionate Richard Hugo readers but those interested in how sound can be used in poetry or fiction in general to amplify the mood and meaning.
You can read this Here for free
Liminal (10 Pages Press)
Yard Man (Make-Do Publishing)
Yard Man is short stories, to be put out by Harvey Thomlinson's Make-Do Publishing.
Want to know when books are available, like the novel, Unside: A Book of Closed Time-Like Curves? Sign up below.
On Crimson: "Fantastic. Really enjoyed the book immensely Part of me will always be in that cave.
'You’re breathing bits of Jesse James, Hitler, Moses and a bunch of dead rabbits and phoney magicians, janitors all their bodies broken down floating around…. The only thing that holds all these things together is the story of your life.' Imagine if the singularity came not as a big bang but as a series of choices by those in power who think they know what’s best for us: corporations, the police force, churches and government. What if they persuaded us that keeping our thoughts private was against our own interests? Young Crimson is growing up in a world where his conversations are sampled and played back on the radio, where even his sub-vocalised thoughts might be screened by the police. He can see people’s auras and hopes one day to help solve crimes but then he finds his girlfriend has gone and soon others who question the status quo disappear. Tantra Bensko’s delicious intrigues with meta-fiction, philosophy, popular culture and the politics of control make us question the uses to which the human need for stories might be put. 'There are happy and sad stories. They have good and bad characters. These are inside Story. Story is created by people, but now it has a mind of its own.” All the while we root for Crimson, at times naïve, at times canny, he grows from being a manga styled school kid to an ontological knight errant travelling out from home to a place of utter darkness and then on to confront the harrowing revelations about the fate of those he loved. This wonderful book is where we find terror in the ordinary, terrible beauty in the extraordinary.' - Gal Budgen, author |
|