Roy Bentley
The Wreck of Your Life on the Evening News
by Roy Bentley
ISBN: 9781962405195
$16.00 (+ $4.63 US Shipping)
Also available as an Ebook and Hardcover from online retailers:
Hardcover ISBN: 9781962405256
Ebook ISBN: 9781962405201
Reviewed by Peter Mladinic in The Brooklyn Rain: Compulsive Reader
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Roy Bentley has published 11 books of poetry. He is the author of Walking with Eve in the Loved City, chosen by Billy Collins as finalist for the Miller Williams poetry prize; Starlight Taxi, winner of the Blue Lynx Poetry Prize; The Trouble with a Short Horse in Montana, chosen by John Gallaher as winner of the White Pine Poetry Prize. He’s received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council (6 times), and the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs. Poems have appeared in New Letters, Prairie Schooner, december, Rattle, The Southern Review, Crazyhorse, and Shenandoah.
ABOUT THE BOOK
The Wreck of Your Life on the Evening News
(a poetic description)
The Wreck of Your Life on the Evening News is about what is
at the heart of the heroics (and heartache) of being an American.
As in “Your nephew saw it—the fatal-car-crash screen footage
on the evening news. Complete with footage of the blood-
and-brain-spatter, the rest of the mayhem you had caused.
He ushered a son away from the TV. Offered a magazine.
Mercy was the Playboy opened to distract your kid with
breasts summoning like some kind of roadside signage.”
The poems about deliverance and other less dire potentialities
real and true. Point being if we dare hope, at least that act of faith
will be built on a demanding pursuit of truth and beauty because,
besides, you know the rest. The part John Keats reminds us of,
where beauty is truth and truth, beauty. Always worth a look.
––Roy Bentley
ADVANCE PRAISE
Roy Bentley’s The Wreck of Your Life on the Evening News includes a poem titled “Why If You Put a Hat and Glasses on a Dog, He Looks Like He Could Drive a Truck,” which of course is reason enough to buy this book. But this poem also includes these lines: Each dog is a set of uncertainties in need of an owner / with a flat-bed truck full of patience. I have to wonder // why any creature tolerates a human. Bentley’s poems drive head-on into hard truth, humor and gravity in precarious and well-considered balance. He writes, If the existence of God is more than a grift, / my Divinity descends the Grand Staircase of // the RMS Titanic in a gown of light. These are poems of light and of dark, of a world holding together just barely. Wonder abounds. —Suzanne Cleary, The Odds
From the first, titular poem in this collection, Roy Bentley’s readers know they’re in a for a wild ride. Darkly funny, haunting, hopeful in spite of themselves, the poems in The Wreck of Your Life on the Evening News move deftly from the long-ago memory of a Doublemint kiss to questioning whether God is a grift, guiding us swiftly through youthful indiscretion––“sin and atonement, in that order”––until the dead begin to whisper and we slow down to listen, intently. Riffing through a crosscurrent undertone of American music, readers are led to a double rainbow rising over an historic battlefield, apt-enough metaphor for the spell these poems cast over a world “always up to its ass in war.” A heart-shaped world, Bentley tells us, where “the Beautiful won’t be contained and the Dead are in every / action we witness.”
––Paula J. Lambert, As If This Did Not Happen Every Day
“Roy Bentley’s poems wear X-ray glasses which he trains on America, and there he discovers its pale, modest junk on full display. He pulls the veil back on the tricks Middle-American life presents us with, where “a sleight of hand making the practitioner a magician / who couldn’t care less about the fate of songbirds”. It’s also about the banal language we’ve acquired to suture and show off our wounds. His characters are “clueless as it gets,” and they are us. Bentley may be a sardonic myth-busting realist at heart, but he is also paradoxically a celebrant songbird, and I read him with deep pleasure and self-recognition all the time. The Wreck of Your Life on the Evening News finds him at the peak of his talent.”
—David Rigsbee
Those familiar with Roy Bentley’s poetry immediately recognize his voice as being simultaneously intimate and worldly and distinctly Appalachian. In The Wreck of Your Life on the Evening News, Bentley’s conversational, pull-no-punches style of storytelling weaves the histories of the United States, the Church, and even the geologic history of Earth with his own. The resulting tapestry of images and revelations explores what it means to be American in a time when defining that national identity is challenging at best and often at odds with the perspectives of friends and family and those nosy next-door neighbors who are ever eager to question “the promise of freedom” we are all sold.
––Chuck Salmons, The Grace of Gazing Inward
