Amy Benson: Like a Cloud You Walk Into and Then Out of Again

In Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Marco Polo describes a series of fantastical places to Kublai Khan, the emperor of the fading Mongol Empire. “With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear,” he says. “Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.”

I mention Invisible Cities because it is the only point of comparison I can make to Amy Benson’s new book, Seven Years to Zero. Like Calvino, Benson has created a book that eludes easy classification, its contents part personal essay and part ekphrastic prose poem. But rather than using invented cities or dreams as a framework to explore human behavior, she looks to art, both real and imagined, to illuminate our fears and desires.

Seven Years of Zero tells the story of a nameless couple who moves to a city that resembles New York in the midst of a changing climate and the debris of late-stage capitalism. Although the sea levels are rising and plastic bags are suffocating landfills, the couple decides to have a child. Benson scaffolds their journey through a series of close readings of art shows, which, stripped largely of their context and provenance, become poignant and fantastical ciphers.

Building on the truism that good art writing expands the resonance of a work rather than limiting it, Benson allows each piece to become a universe into itself, whether it is a sculpture that collects is an experiment in attention and perception, challenging how we look at a work of art, at the lives we build, or at our connection to the collective “we.”