Ben Fama

Wild Roses Ben Fama

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.