Congratulations to Lauren Haldeman, Bennington Review web designer and contributor to our Winter Issue, Issue Four, coming soon! Winner of the 2017 Colorado Prize for Poetry!
“With an extraordinarily light touch, Lauren Haldeman glides us through the peregrinations of grief and delight with a revivifying play and formal resourcefulness. Instead of Dying shows us that whimsy, that the imagination sustains life.”
—Dean Young
“Each of the seven sections of Instead of Dying delivers singular shocks and unanswerable questions. Guided by great figures in the history of science, these poems court the mystery lying beyond the precision of language and symbols in ‘the spell of the world pouring down.’ Lauren Haldeman’s writing opens us toward the work of mourning. Did I say work? Rather call it song.”
—Susan Howe
“In this searing book, Lauren Haldeman designs a series of intricate afterlives for her lost brother, braiding these memorials with poignant lyrics that chart the personal outlines of grief. Haldeman offers these poems as acts of generosity, but be warned: her ‘crystalline path’ is a sharp one, to be walked not by the dead, but by those left behind to make sense of loss. Instead of Dying is part elegy, part star map, part book of cures. Here, the body may be healed by syringes filled with sunlight, by secret walks in the woods, and above all, by language itself, which emerges, powerfully, to move us toward the light of forgiveness even in our darkest hour.”
—Kiki Petrosino