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If to philosophize is to learn to die, then to write poetry is to learn to endure, or, in Ben Fama’s words, to “consent to pain.”
Wild Roses, Ben Fama’s third full-length collection of poems, escapes the mirror maze of late capitalism only to land in the haunted house of self-reflective thought. Drawing on Robert Bresson, Christian mysticism, and the embattled digital surfaces of the present, Fama creates a writing for our moment.
Moving between dread and devotional hunger, these poems treat the contemporary subject as a creature caught between incompatible forms of devotion: philosophical pessimism, Catholic mysticism, pop-culture mantras, AI chatbots, BDSM, beach-house melancholy, and the small humiliations of daily life. Fama’s speakers want transcendence but get caught up in their interfaces; they want purity but encounter endless desire; they want to be “good” in a world rife with pain. For Fama, pain is a method of attention, a way of locating the real when reality feels increasingly mediated and parodic.
Wild Roses offers a poetics both wry and grievous, which understands how longing can be both the engine of hope and the mechanism of harm. Nonetheless, Fama persists in asking how we live, and whom we worship, when consolation is indistinguishable from what wounds us.
— Melissa Febos
"Divine ambivalence is the coherence of Wild Roses. The prick of the thorn, the thinned-out velvet of the petal-limbs its own private nervous system, and the heart refusing to distinguish between tenderness and pain, or between sobriety and good drugs, or between computer love and love. An erotics of restraint turns these poems into spells and prayers, penance, ritual sacrifice, and the sites of real stakes which are always narrowly escaping the danger of being cloned by artificial ones. In an era when many get away with bypassing the soul for the ego on the page, Fama accomplishes the opposite, he crucifies and redistributes his ego across this map of his sublimated desires here, without pathos, as a matter of personal integrity. A new kind of sacrament, blunt syncretism, Manhattan’s, California falling into the ocean or the machine, a private universe where dread is pierced by real faith, real vulnerability, as if it’s safe to be romantic again, without irony for a sunbeam or scapegoat. True poets can be earnest without being corny or frigid, there are a few left, here is one. All good things come to those who stay true."
— Harmony Holiday
"A book to bow down to."
— Elaine Kahn