Swain County NCWN-West rep Benjamin
Cutler's first book, The Geese Who Might Be Gods, is forthcoming from Main
Street Rag Press in May! It's now available for pre-order at a
substantial discount at
http://mainstreetragbookstore.com/product/the-geese-who-might-be-gods-benjamin-cutler/.
Ben Cutler’s first book of poems is
rooted in a particular soil, or bone, of this world, the mountains and rivers
of the southern Appalachians; but its branches and crowns stretch out to the
hope of a post-apocalyptic tomato sandwich and back to Eden. Cutler’s
imagination, like his vulture, is endlessly hungry, but it quivers, “lip-torn
and breathless”, with empathy for and identification with everything it
touches—bees, bats, children, god-geese whose necks write the letter S “for all
their secrets.” These are quirky, accessible poems full of the music of common
language. The casual browser, in picking
up this collection, need not fear being bullied or patronized—nothing too scary
here, unless you count loneliness, death, the perils of love, or the end of the
world. But it is in their setting that
the poet’s perilous love for the world finds its context and its meaning. The
Geese Who Might Be Gods will reward reading and re-reading with passage
into a familiar world both rendered strange and seen anew, as if on “the first
day’s morning—// when everything first opened / and reached for the new light.”
A Swain High English teacher as well
as a poet, Ben Cutler has also been recently awarded 1st prize in TWO of the
2019 North Carolina Poetry Society Poetry Contests: The Carol Bessent Poetry of
Love contest for his poem “Speak of Rivers” and the Poetry of Witness contest
for his poem “The Church of Unmaking.” Everyone, please congratulate Ben!
