Terracotta Fragments

Author: Eric Tyler Benick

Publisher: Antiphony (2026)

Inspired by the forced parataxis of a museum where vestiges of the past appear without immediate context or correlation, Eric Tyler Benick’s Terracotta Fragments exhumes the turbid remainders of memory and arranges them in the politics of the present. Images stack on top of the other bricolaged of disparate time, tense, and materials. Benick’s lyrical I is sparse, not a locus of activity but an ancillary event, a self that merely happens, affects very little, and is gone. The Imagistic and the ruminative cohabit the short bursts of poetic action, the ancient overlays the contemporary, the sacred overlays the banal, humor and dejection are two ends of the same experience. Benick’s second collection continues his interest in the serial approach to poetic disintegration whereby the process of recall acts also as a process of forgetting.