Description

Pleasure Boat Studio, paperback

Publication Date: April 5th, 2023

Publisher Marketing: This long-awaited collection is the final manuscript assembled by poet Beth Bentley, who passed away in 2021 after a lifetime devoted to poetry. Her wide-ranging poems reflect on her deep love of art and philosophy, crystalline remembrances of family, and on the lives of cultural figures from history. They explore her Jewish heritage, her fierce feminism, and her perception of herself from an early age as an outsider. Missing Addresses evokes our losses, via age and happenstance, lending insight into the touchstones of our existence: our friends and families, our memories, our identities.

Her writing, dense with remembered moments, blazes with sudden intensity. Paul Hunter, Breaking Ground, Mr. Brick & the Boys, and Stubble Field

[Bentleys] genius for metaphor shines [and] reflects not only the magnitude of the individual poem but the magnitude of poetry itself, a magnitude displayed on every page of this remarkable book. Linda Bierds, The Hardy Tree, Rogets Illusions, and First Hand

Missing Addresses holds the music, forms, astute observations, and wit of Beth Bentleys finest work. This volume is, quite simply, a tour de force. Judith Skillman, House of Burnt Offerings, Premise of Light, and The Phoenix

Just as with someone flipping through an old address book who sees the names of those no longer among us, an image or sound returns that resonates for a long, long time. Sharon Hashimoto, The Crane Wife and More American

Nimble and often playful, she is never less than deadly serious. [A] fine, overdue collection. Anne Pitkin, Yellow, Winter Arguments, and But Still, Music

Missing Addresses begins by inhabiting familiar feelings of loss and wry hope the poet experiences when readying her garden for winter; her subjects expand ever outward to other places and people, some of whom she addresses directly and some whom she unerringly becomes. Sherry Rind, The Storehouse of Wonder and Astonishment, Between States of Matter, and A Fall Out the Door

Beth Bentley writes with sharp imagistic detail, illuminating her physical and psychological landscapes. Beauty and brutal honesty are juxtaposed. Daphne Davies,Hazels Star