ericshop.png

$17.95

Terracotta Fragments by Eric Tyler Benick

Available for pre-order.

Books ship end of Jan, 2026.

Inspired by the forced parataxis of a museum where vestiges of the past appear without immediate context or correlation, Eric Tyler Benick’s Terracotta Fragments exhumes the turbid remainders of memory and arranges them in the politics of the present. Images stack on top of the other bricolaged of disparate time, tense, and materials. Benick’s lyrical I is sparse, not a locus of activity but an ancillary event, a self that merely happens, affects very little, and is gone. The Imagistic and the ruminative cohabit the short bursts of poetic action, the ancient overlays the contemporary, the sacred overlays the banal, humor and dejection are two ends of the same experience. Benick’s second collection continues his interest in the serial approach to poetic disintegration whereby the process of recall acts also as a process of forgetting.

The first line of Terracotta Fragments, “my mother’s head tumbling down the steps of the Colosseum”, introduces several of the book’s concerns: a physical commitment to discontinuity; a series of quilting points between the mysteries of antiquity and the ruthless familiarity of our world; an Orphic sacrifice of melody in exchange for knowledge of Hell, shredded and scattered between the Amalfi Coast and the JSTOR archives, the Hotel California and Ronald Reagan National Airport, which is also Hell. Benick’s fragments accumulate into a chant of glass shards on a cracked screen that spell out: all these images are going to kill you. But that’s okay, as one of the only moments approaching enjambment makes clear, “I write a quick list on the R train / three things worse than death— / dialysis, Red Delicious, eternity”.

—Emily Martin

Terracotta Fragments conjures a museum, line-by-line, of ancient objects alongside present desires, perceptions and failures in a gorgeous and disquieting blur of sensory artifacts. Ekphrastic flickers, gifts of broken shards, these poems offer a whirl of precise and often hilarious gestures, where the surface of each line multiplies in a deep array of ache: "the beautiful world begging me to destroy it". It is in these moments where the overwhelming dazzle of broken sensation drifts across the bounds of these poems. Eric Tyler Benick immerses us within this present of impasse, his poems pressing against a moribund order ready to shatter, "barbiturates of a slow and deliberate touch".

—Geoffrey Olsen

Eric Tyler Benick is the author of the fox hunts (Beautiful Days, 2023), Memory Field; A Travelogue of Forgetting (Long Day, 2024), and Solip Schism (Blue Bag, 2024). With Nick Rossi, he runs Ursus Americanus Press, a publisher of shorter poetics. His work has appeared in Bennington Review, Brooklyn Review, Copper Nickel, Harvard Advocate, Meridian, Puerto Del Sol, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn and he teaches postcolonial and anticarceral literatures at Wagner.

Terracotta Fragments by Eric Tyler Benick

Available for pre-order.

Books ship end of Jan, 2026.

Inspired by the forced parataxis of a museum where vestiges of the past appear without immediate context or correlation, Eric Tyler Benick’s Terracotta Fragments exhumes the turbid remainders of memory and arranges them in the politics of the present. Images stack on top of the other bricolaged of disparate time, tense, and materials. Benick’s lyrical I is sparse, not a locus of activity but an ancillary event, a self that merely happens, affects very little, and is gone. The Imagistic and the ruminative cohabit the short bursts of poetic action, the ancient overlays the contemporary, the sacred overlays the banal, humor and dejection are two ends of the same experience. Benick’s second collection continues his interest in the serial approach to poetic disintegration whereby the process of recall acts also as a process of forgetting.

The first line of Terracotta Fragments, “my mother’s head tumbling down the steps of the Colosseum”, introduces several of the book’s concerns: a physical commitment to discontinuity; a series of quilting points between the mysteries of antiquity and the ruthless familiarity of our world; an Orphic sacrifice of melody in exchange for knowledge of Hell, shredded and scattered between the Amalfi Coast and the JSTOR archives, the Hotel California and Ronald Reagan National Airport, which is also Hell. Benick’s fragments accumulate into a chant of glass shards on a cracked screen that spell out: all these images are going to kill you. But that’s okay, as one of the only moments approaching enjambment makes clear, “I write a quick list on the R train / three things worse than death— / dialysis, Red Delicious, eternity”.

—Emily Martin

Terracotta Fragments conjures a museum, line-by-line, of ancient objects alongside present desires, perceptions and failures in a gorgeous and disquieting blur of sensory artifacts. Ekphrastic flickers, gifts of broken shards, these poems offer a whirl of precise and often hilarious gestures, where the surface of each line multiplies in a deep array of ache: "the beautiful world begging me to destroy it". It is in these moments where the overwhelming dazzle of broken sensation drifts across the bounds of these poems. Eric Tyler Benick immerses us within this present of impasse, his poems pressing against a moribund order ready to shatter, "barbiturates of a slow and deliberate touch".

—Geoffrey Olsen

Eric Tyler Benick is the author of the fox hunts (Beautiful Days, 2023), Memory Field; A Travelogue of Forgetting (Long Day, 2024), and Solip Schism (Blue Bag, 2024). With Nick Rossi, he runs Ursus Americanus Press, a publisher of shorter poetics. His work has appeared in Bennington Review, Brooklyn Review, Copper Nickel, Harvard Advocate, Meridian, Puerto Del Sol, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn and he teaches postcolonial and anticarceral literatures at Wagner.

You Might Also Like