Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
A Magnificent Loneliness

A Magnificent Loneliness

White, Allison Benis

Paperback

General Poetry

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ISBN10: 1961897229
ISBN13: 9781961897229
Publisher: Four Way Books
Published: Mar 15 2025
Pages: 72
Weight: 0.40
Height: 0.40 Width: 8.90 Depth: 8.90
Language: English

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.

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