Before

Bensen's sixth collection, Before, enacts pivotal moments when a life alters course, moments when the speaker looks back, struggling to understand how what came “before” passed into a way of seeing so new as to make the old vision nearly incomprehensible. Many of the poems chronicle childhood and adolescent initiations, as in “Before You Know It,” in which a close brush with death replaces childhood innocence with a knowledge of mortality. Here, the middle-aged speaker mourns the lost opportunity to express gratitude to those many family members who nurtured him and even rescued him from the brink of annihilation, while they themselves “one by one / . . . disappeared into holes in the earth.” These are poems that honor the ages of human life, poems of resilience, of dark humor, of surprise, of sudden illumination.