"Benson captures the paranoia and search for escape that is found in much of contemporary life. She does so with beautiful language and a unique approach, joining in the tradition of great "art as life" works as The Horse's Mouth and Letters on Cezanne ." -- JMWW "Benson employs a poetic approach to language, making the natural world flicker and animate itself through lyrical precision and powerful images." -- The Rumpus "Like Calvino, Benson has created a book that eludes easy classification, its contents part personal essay and part ekphrastic prose poem. But rather than using invented cities or dreams as a framework to explore human behavior, she looks to art, both real and imagined, to illuminate our fears and desires." -- Guernica "Perception and imagination come together thrillingly in Amy Benson's beautiful sentences. The city is shown as a gallery, where the line between daily life and artwork tantalizingly thins. 'We live in the middle of perpetual construction,' she writes, and so her book accrues, trusting to not-knowing and speculation to arrive at a place where everything counts.
" --Phillip Lopate, author of A Mother's Tale "An essential book for these dark and terrifying times. Benson writes brilliantly and tenderly about what it means to make art when everything is falling to pieces around you." --Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation "Benson has conjured that most reluctant of ghosts: the ghost of the present, the one with the most startling and strange news to report of all. These essays are at once companionable and ingenious, with a vision that feels extraterrestrial and also wholly ours." --Rivka Galchen, Atmospheric Disturbances Praise for The Sparkling-Eyed Boy "While the words "what if" may be the most potent daydream triggers known to humanity, writers usually explore the road-not-taken in the format of fiction. Benson's Bakeless Prize-winning work of "creative nonfiction" comprises some 32 entries relating to the "sparkling-eyed boy" of her teen years, her first big love. So this is a memoir, then, of what did not happen.
" -- Publishers Weekly "[Her] poetic memoir.built on dreams and memories of what never happened, but could have." -- USA Today "A provocative, intense read." -- Booklist, ALA "Startling insight and precision.a potent meditation on love, summer, youth, and how the three intertwine." -- Body&Soul.