Alyse Bensel : part one

Alyse Bensel is the author of Rare Wondrous Things: A Poetic Biography of Maria Sibylla Merian (Green Writers Press, 2020), and three chapbooks. Her work has appeared in AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, Southern Indiana Review, and West Branch. She serves as Poetry Editor for Cherry Tree and teaches at Brevard College, where she directs the Looking Glass Rock Writers’ Conference. 

Photo credit: Mercedes Lucero

What are you working on?

Lately, I have turned to hybrid essays and fiction writing. My poems have taken more prosaic, elongated turns, and so I have followed that turn in my latest focus: the dead and the missing in my life and familial history. My paternal grandmother was killed before her 30th birthday in a traffic accident. Her death and her very existence have existed on the periphery of my family since I can remember. And friends have died from overdoses or made terrible decisions that have effectively cut them off from society. These subjects continue to morph in how I approach writing about them, as they border the line between poem and essay and speculation. It’s both uneasy and exciting to not know what final shape this new work will take.