Spoil

Pain has a pressure, and the poems in Spoil are the diamonds that result, each sharp with the heart’s longings, answered and unanswered, with the clarion terror of living in a body, especially one often at odds with one’s will. Bensel’s work cuts to the marrow of what it means to be human, to be betrayed by the body and by those we love. But there is hope here, too, that pain can lead to possibility, to beauty, “The seams where you tore apart, mended in rivers.”—Emma Bolden, author of The Tiger and the Cage.