The Park
by James Benger (signed)
published by Kelsay Books on March 21, 2019
paperback
70 pages

“so many of them/never even had/dreams to lose,” Benger writes of the inhabitants of the trailer park featured here, called simply The Park. It’d be easy to do this wrong, to re-use the old trailer park clichés, but Benger does more than that by sketching distinct characters like the boy with “neon orange plastic water pistol” who hopes to find in the woods by The Park “a baby fox or coyote,/something to call his own, something that will love him/in the way he loves his home.” In “Legend” an old guy in stained white underwear pisses on a propane tank. In “Fire,” a crying woman shoots her pellet gun at the beautiful sunset because “the beauty of it is too painful.” Poems of deprivation and despair, poems of yearning, and also, most remarkably, poems of surprising love for “The Park," for home.
-Brian Daldorph, author of “Ice Age”

In the desperate pits of trailer park humanity, Benger’s characters hold the smallest light of hope tightly – in some cases, to the point of strangulation. The children of the trailer park neighborhood dream largely enough for everyone, but resolve for a better future is further than the horizon. The characters are haunted by shame, lack of control, and the knowledge that there’s a beautiful world just out of their reach. Benger gets his readers to constantly ask, “Where is the breaking point for these characters?” The trick is, they’ve already surpassed it. Sometimes, the best they can do is “[squeeze their] eyes so tight, / [clutch] the pillow to / either side of [their] head, / and [try] to imagine / that [they feel] fortunate.”

-Linzi Garcia, author of “Thank You”

It’s true. James Benger has taken on the form of an old school camera in The Park. Each of the poems he has produced are like a picture pulled out from a shoebox that was placed under the edge of a broken down bed a forgotten number of years ago. What you’re holding in your hand right now is something quite great, a nostalgic collection that will remind us all that we walk beside both the dreamers and the damned.

-Victor Clevenger, author of “On the Tip of our Tongues”