Between the Lakes
Published by above/ground press - December 2023
Part one of a long poem documenting my travel around the border of the Between the Lakes Treaty area.
Without Form
Published by The Blasted Tree & knife | fork | book
- August 2021
Since the mid-1500s, the text of the Holy Bible has been subdivided into chapters and verses. These markings are all we see in Ben Robinson’s Without Form, a meticulous erasure of the Bible sparing only its notation. The resultant text drifts like atomized numerical clouds across the mathematical superstructure of the divine, hinting at a supreme silence before the word. This ambitious project encompasses all sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments combined—over seven hundred and fifty pages—co-published as a limited edition hardcover art book by The Blasted Tree and knife | fork | book.
Reviews & Interviews
…the form without the content is no dead thing, nothing meaningless, but rather a geography of constellated glyphs that add up to the possibility of imagining life.
Visual Poetry Through the Lens of the Long Poem: A Conversation
I number this text among those which render me, if not speechless, then counting its blessings.
Can I say I prefer the bible this way? How simple it renders the religious/spiritual endeavor: to seek not what is there, but what is not. Here is Stevens’ snow man, “the listener, who . . . beholds / Nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is.”
This unreadable and unknowable Word invites the reader not into the task of comprehension but into the space of reflection, not into an absolute void, but into the human attempt to allow the divine Word to appear.
Low Vacancy
Published by Kalamalka Press - June 2021
Low Vacancy won the 2020 John Lent Poetry/Prose Award and was published in an edition of 65 copies.
“Ben Robinson’s Low Vacancy—with captivating understatement and something like casual precision—tours us through domestic spaces and therein shows us how time flows and stills and breaks. Robinson’s calm control is especially impressive as he transitions his compressed meditations from the stirring present- into the rather melancholic future-tense. Low Vacancy—especially with its focus on alienated city-living and the vicious-beautiful/beautiful-vicious cycles of life—is an apt and affecting piece for our fraught present moment.”
—JAKE KENNEDY