Works
Visitations
Visitations explores the natural world, ecology, and the visual arts through a series of vivid visitations to multiple times, geographies, and physical bodies. "I rejoice that poetry this good is still being written." -- Richard Tillinghast
Visitations
Anita Claire Scharf Award, University of Tampa Press
GREEN SOLDIERS by John Bensko Yale Younger Poets Award
Green Soldiers
Winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award
Described by Richard Hugo in the forward as a book about ancestors, the book explores the emotions of loss, separation, and isolation.
Described by Richard Hugo in the forward as a book about ancestors, the book explores the emotions of loss, separation, and isolation.
The Waterman’s Children
“In The Waterman’s Children, John Bensko is a traveler and, like Elizabeth Bishop, his travels bring him more questions than answers. It is the states of the American South that these finely crafted poems seem to wander through mostly, but the real journey is, of course, much more interior and universal. What lovely subtleties there are in these pages, what wry and melancholy voices!”
–Leon Stokesbury
The Iron City
The iron city is a world in which a child and the people around him are trapped in the mystery of their surroundings, trying to reach toward love and clarity.
Sea Dogs
This imaginative collection takes readers from the remote interior of Mexico to the streets of New York and lingers in the regions of the coastal South. In the least likely places, the absurd and mysterious mingle with the familiar. Quirky obsessive characters find connections they didn’t know they needed.