Allison Benis White

Allison Benis White Poems

Allison Benis White Biography

Alison Benis White is an American poet. White is the author of Self-Portrait with Crayon, which was selected by poet Robert Hill Long as the winner of the 2008 Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Prize. Her second manuscript, Small Porcelain Head, was selected for the 2011 Four Way Books Levis Prize by poet Claudia Rankine. Her poems have appeared in journals such as The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, Pleiades, and Ploughshares. She has received the Indiana Review Poetry Prize, the Bernice Slote Award from Prairie Schooner, and a Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers. She has also been recognized with a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship to the Sewanee Writer’s Conference and an Emerging Writer Fellowship from the Writer's Center. White received her M.F.A. from the University of California, Irvine.)

The Best Poem Of Allison Benis White

From Please Bury Me In This

Maybe my arms lifted as a woman lowers a dress over my head.
This is not what I want to tell you.
Looking at red flowers on her mother's dress
as she sat on her lap on a train is Woolf's first memory.
Then the sound of waves behind a yellow shade,
of being alive as ecstasy.
Maybe her mind, as I read, lowering over my mind.
Maybe looking down, as I sit on the floor,
at the book inside the diamond of my legs.
Even briefly, to love with someone else's mind.
Moving my lips as I read the waves breaking,
one, two, one, two, and sending a splash of water over the beach.
What I want to tell you is ecstasy.

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