Illustrated Games of Patience

Author: Ben Estes

Publisher: The Song Cave (2015)

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.”