In these dramatic poems, the agon pits ideas against the lurch and 
drift of bodies. Both are necessary, as the hand is necessary to 
write the poem, and both are reconciled here by a sensitivity to the 
pleasures of melodic form.

    "Bene-Dictions is a canny, unnerving book. Its cool manners seem 
to hold compassion at bay; but its irony is a cleansing discipline 
which allows it to conjure complex lusts, hurts, and injustices 
without self-pity and, apparently, without delusion. These poems 
describe a world in which: ‘Tenderness is an accident of character/ 
or energy, or just a side-effect/of having failed at what you wanted, 
but in which the reader, to read the effect of rain on paper/opens 
the book/in a storm, as though to find the world itself in tears.’"
—Rosanna Warren, Judge

    "If the long hours in offices of the mind elect for us 
meaningfulness, they must always eventually find the human heart. 
Then Rankin’s vivid and surprising poems map that movement 
where as Rilke insists, what is sublime is mundane, and everything 
that falls must somehow in shadow/act, rise."—Norman Dubie

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RUSH RANKIN has published in The Failure of Grief, as well as 
in such journals as the Paris Review and Triquarterly. He currently 
teaches theory and literature at the Kansas City Art Institute.


Number Ten: Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry