Through capturing these individual experiences, insights, and revelations in concrete and telling detail and through language and images that sear and singe, the poems speak to the universal human condition.

Bensel grounds her poems in the everyday. Yet, under her sharp focus, the quotidian is also unfamiliar, surprising, even startling at times. Real and virtual interactions, relationships, and rituals are the raw materials she molds into works of harrowing beauty.

Social media and smartphones are central to several poems in which modern life is mediated through pixels and touchscreens. (“Succumb to the grid that performs happiness.”) While digital tools ostensibly allow the speaker in these poems to access images, information, and people who are unavailable directly, the overriding sense is that the device is more of a barrier or, in the best case, a sad reminder of the reality of separation. It is a theme running through at least half a dozen poems in the collection, but perhaps best illustrated in the beginning of “Litany Broken by Praying Mantis.”

As relatable and distressing as the social media poems may be, Bensel has the most impact when her poems address, with courageous honesty, betrayals that the speaker has suffered. Some are betrayals of the body, particularly fertility challenges, or of circumstance, injustices that may not have any blame to be assigned. Other betrayals are personal, committed by family and partners and doctors, especially men.

The most striking betrayals may be in “Shotgun,” a poem in which two women are abandoned by their husbands and the titular weapon expresses itself in varying but painful ways: as recoil from difficult stories, as a wedding with a pregnant bride, as a carefully cleaned tool that nonetheless threatens to misfire.

Spoil is a challenging read emotionally. It is a collection filled with unflinching poems determinedly staring down distance, estrangement, and dissolution. But it is also powerful. The poems are beautiful, insightful, and ultimately enriching for readers. They generously share with us fiercely honest experiences that help us understand the world a little better.

The following poem stood out for its form and power. The speaker, in the throes of an unnamed grief, lets the reader join her in her anguish, resilience, and anger.

Bensel graduated from Washington College in 2010 with a major in environmental science and a minor in creative writing, and her association with the College continues. Now an assistant professor of English at Brevard College in North Carolina, Bensel also serves as the poetry editor of Cherry Tree, the national literary journal published by the Washington College Rose O’Neill Literary House.

Litany Broken by Praying Mantis 
(Excerpt) 

For the curated image, the sentence

in replica hearts, the bots toiling

for the algorithmic science of affection

that predicted the passing glance

suspended for years, a pause

on the screen while we touch glass,

the illusion of flesh underneath 

high resolution in a self that mimics

gazing into each other’s eyes,

for the fantasy slipping through

the screen that obeys swipe and scroll,

when the icon illuminates,

conjecturing the body outside.