Poetry. What exactly is an illustrated game of patience? Imagine something like group solitaire within a room full of objects, Duchamp on a TV, some great old albums, voices from a radio or the past, and a set of reverberating cymbals. In Ben Estes's ILLUSTRATED GAMES OF PATIENCE, the game involves sorting through objects and landscapes to reveal their "soft hums of isolation," often in the wake of love. If there is winning involved, the rewards are hope for renewal and a "faith in arranging." Filled with color and light, these poems make vivid the tender details of close observation, "urging love to stretch and green." "This beautiful work of late Romanticism finds Estes often roaming, sometimes making his bed in uncomfortable places, exemplifying patience, to which he at one point builds an actual broad-bodied monument. He is patient because he has the whole world and all of time at his disposal. The poems speak in riddles, impossible questions, vivid sensuous description, and, on one page, doggerel. Scent fetishists will appreciate the descriptions of crotch smells. In fact, there should be something here to satisfy hedonists of all stripes."—Aaron Kunin "Ben Estes's poems, with their piquant accentuation and glorious measured sensuality, remind me a little of James Schuyler's. I also feel: bouquets not previously perceived, a style I can't fully attribute to the twentieth century or any previous. A strange new liberty quietly makes itself known."—Lucy Ives

Illustrated Games of Patience

Literature & Fiction

Estes, Ben

Poetry

The Song Cave

With mounting intensity extended across three sections of poems, Ben Estes' achingly personal second collection unfolds to reveal an uncertain past, present, and future that is by turns mysterious and beautiful. ABC MOONLIGHT contains poems that are filled with reflective awareness and subconsciously constructed dreams; a sweeping landscape of queer Midwestern loss and desire; and pairs of "folded poems" that question love, hope, and vulnerability in these harrowing times. Rather than prescribing answers, Estes offers the reader intimacy and open-handed, big-hearted consolation--"Now to let something go / of myself, / without any need / to replace it" 
"Ben Estes' new poems, here gathered together into numbered, cadenced and syncopated movements, trace themselves onto the reader's consciousness like a sort of extended, scorched earth sigh: "Humans will / lose their purpose,' it says. Phew.' Flood and fire focused, like the times they are written inside of, the poems' language drives straight towards, and eventually lands in, the telegraphic delivery of dreams, where loss and love are confused and finally remembered to be the same thing. The unexpectedness of fantasy mixed with the inevitability of memory is narrated by Estes from both before and after."--Matt Connors 
"Valéry says that the future is "the most perceptible fraction of the present moment," but ABC MOONLIGHT gets us, as Devo says, jerkin' back'n' forth between what a mind once made up and the life to come. The writing here is a generous fusion of poetry and dreaming, one in which the poet-dreamer is ever cognizant of the collective as he plumbs his mind to find love and death in the American navel. If this book were a band, it would be called Ben Estes and Latent Destiny, and they'd play at your place every night."--Graham Foust 
"This poetry is snaily, somehow: both within and looking upon. It suggests we have to hide, but also plod on. And that is just how things feel, so often now. Ben Estes's new poems give me the feeling of life, aliveness, what it's like. There's apocalypse in ABC Moonlight but also tender, gorgeous wondering about human futures, wonder in both the forward-looking action sense (I wonder what will happen) and wonder in whatever is left of the Romantic address--awe and amazement. The line is magic again. The moon is babble."--Hannah Brooks Motl 
Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. California Interest.

ABC Moonlight

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Books by Estes, Ben

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Estes, Ben. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Illustrated Games of Patience

ABC Moonlight