This Still Life

"The latest collaboration between Jason Baldinger and James Benger hits like perfect rock n' roll poetry dedicated to every bar regular who never thought anything of their thoughts and instead decided to light a cigarette. With images of winters too cold for human empathy and midwestern frustrations brought on because nothing wants to go right, Baldinger and Benger's latest is an excellent portrait of poetic working-class Americana. A fiery Whitman-esque yawp not meant for literary luminaries but for those who don't know how to define the fire within themselves."






-Daniel W. Wright, author of Love Letters from the Underground





"In This Still Life, Jason Baldinger & James Benger return for a third masterful collaboration with Baldinger sending out his calls like a lone bird in the Rust Belt, waiting for Benger's answer in the Midwest. Two unique voices studying this span where "we only live a handful of days", finding the beauty in struggle & loss through fine-tuned lenses as time & place are travelled, observed, & recorded for any who come across this collection of musings in the future. "All this is temporary", so let's make our way to the stream or ocean & enjoy this moment before we resurface."






-Tim Heerdink, author of Somniloquy & Trauma in the Knottseau Well


"Whether they're set in a factory, or thrift store, a woods or city sidewalk, the poems in This Still Life illustrate two simultaneous accounts of life in this USA. The poems converse and converge, often in cars or riverbanks-Benger: rivers flow in the unblemished sky/a sky that if you squint/and try real hard/will tell you/sweet air is still out there/just not here. Baldinger: I see a burial party/come to cover you in mud/while that rain brown river/never dredged safe/rages in a concrete bed. The poems here recount life's moments-ball games, nights out, car rides-as if ceremonial, the everyday made holy by virtue of attentiveness. Baldinger: this is the midwest/every road is a candlelit hex/

every road is a crossroad drugstore/every road is a tattooed waitress/sleeved

in an abandoned gas station. Benger: he thinks of the walnuts on grandpa's farm/how clean and pure they tasted/how precise/how delicate the procedure/

of removing flesh from shell/how it never rained/or if it did/it wouldn't last." The world that Baldinger and Benger paint together is a world of reverence and nostalgia, of loyalty and reminiscence, where their eager brushstrokes of right now are forever water-colored with a mist of what once was."






-Kerry Trautman, author of Artifacts and To Be Nonchalantly Alive


"In This Still Life, Jason Baldinger and James Benger offer keen observations and reflections about struggle, nostalgia, and monotony as they take us through the junk pile of a collapsed world. This bold and effortless collaboration sheds a light on those picking through the pile, trying to make some sort of life from the rubble."






-Cord Moreski, Author of The News Around Town, Host of The Couch Poets Collective