ABC Moonlight

“The writing here is a generous fusion of poetry and dreaming, one in which the poet-dreamer is ever cognizant of the collective as he plumbs his mind to find love and death in the American navel.” —Graham Foust

With mounting intensity extended across three sections of poems, Ben Estes'' achingly personal second collection unfolds to reveal an uncertain past, present and future that is by turns mysterious and beautiful. ABC Moonlight contains poems that are filled with reflective awareness and subconsciously constructed dreams; a sweeping landscape of queer Midwestern loss and desire; and pairs of "folded poems" that question love, hope and vulnerability in these harrowing times. Rather than prescribing answers, Estes offers the reader intimacy and open-handed, big-hearted consolation—"Now to let something go / of myself, / without any need / to replace it."
Ben Estes lives in Kingston, New York. Before this book, he wrote a book of poems called Illustrated Games of Patience (The Song Cave, 2015). Estes worked as the editor of A Dark Dreambox of Another Kind: the poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton (with Alan Felsenthal); Together & Alone, the photographs of Karlheinz Weinberger; and the poetry anthology On The Mesa: An Anthology of Bolinas Writing (The Song Cave, 2021). He has most recently shown his paintings at Situations Gallery and Paula Cooper Gallery, both in New York.