Jenkin Benson’s debut full-length collection are we rocking with this? (New Mundo, 2025) emphasizes the failures of connection and lyric communication. Working in the traditions of past avant-garde movements, from the Language school poets to the relentless experiments of James Joyce, Benson is militantly opposed to the McPoem, the poem of direct confession, of directly personal experience. Instead, the waste land left in the wake of neoliberal capitalism, its liminal spaces on and offline, make up these poems’ subject matter in poems like “millennial facebook message archive circa 2012” and “post-bachelor of arts in english call center job #2.” Language is material that already contains its own failure, its own glitch. While situated in the seemingly abstract realms of academic and online discourse, Benson reminds us that the glitch is the material making itself known, the remnant of a physical world that cannot be abstracted away. This forms the foundation for the collection’s politics, its ruthless critique of seemingly apolitical “lyric of consciousness […] what / a waste of sone archive.” Benson’s poems at once bring the reader back to the material and push us forward into the future of what language can do.
Venya Gushchin is a poet, translator, and assistant professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Southern California. His translation of the Kalmyk poet Dordzhi Dzhaldzhireev is forthcoming from World Poetry Books in 2027. His writing has appeared in Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus; Words Without Borders; No, Dear; and elsewhere.