The Mouth Is Also a Compass is a dystopian expedition that holds space for hope. An environmental disaster forces one woman to set out on a solitary expedition to find the Last Ice Age. During her journey, the speaker experiences both calamity and conciliation as she begins to understand the scope of her responsibility to the natural world. How do we create our own ecology of survival in an increasingly unpredictable climate? How can we cause less harm to the environment and animals we share the air, land, and water with? These poems explore our ethical duty to protect by subverting the traditional exploration narrative in which the explorer discovers/conquers/exploits with a feminist ecopoetic perspective that emphasizes consciousness and care.
Carrie Bennett is the author of three previous poetry collections, biography of water, The Land Is a Painted Thing, and Lost Letters and Other Animals. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and currently teaches writing at Boston University. She is a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellow and lives in Somerville, MA with her family.
"The Mouth Is Also a Compass by Carrie Bennett 'breaks open the sea' and takes us on a daring expedition to the natural world that transports and transforms all of us. These feminist poems of apocalyptic adventure insist on seeking and surviving. They are meticulously rendered and filled with unpredictable images of odd and alluring intimacy. Elegant and stunning!" — Nathalie Handal
"I prepare to leave / my vanishing glacier,' the speaker tells us as she embarks Shackleton–like on an expedition, using language like an ice ax, feeling her way, inscape to landscape, to a place where there are '[l]ight crystals big as a shadow box, moonlit apple-green.' The journey is archetypal, radical, and elegiac; her only companion a wolf, the only outcome a slow-moving apocalypse. 'I can walk, I can't leave nice straight lines,' she writes, as the poems, many in the form of last entries from an explorer's log, terrify, and transform and heighten, the grandeur and danger around her. Piercing lyricism. Inventive form. What a fierce and fearsome book!" — Joan Houlihan
"From the opening of Carrie Bennett's suspenseful narrative, an unnamed speaker documents ecological collapse via astonishing apocalyptic lyric. In a place where '[n]ot even a footprint [is] left / behind,' the speaker encounters a mysterious wolf who moves with her like a shadow despite the speaker's need for 'more solitude.' The duo search for food in stores that are now coffins; to survive means to 'collect / poisonous plants to preserve / what little food is left' and so the pair endure: scavenging, searching, persevering in an epic storm. In the survival handbook that ends the collection, Bennett details our alchemical, interconnected ecologies; she gifts us a blueprint of resilience amid failure, reminds us of our inherent adaptive instincts, reveals our hidden utilities and where they are buried in the elements around us. I feel gratitude, not terror, to be 'still human, / even for only an hour. That [I] have / hands that can no longer harm.' Bennett shows us how to be alive in ruin without enacting harm." — Diana Khoi Nguyen
