Sheri Benning

Sheri Benning’s fourth collection of poetry, Field Requiem, is forthcoming with Carcanet Press in 2021.

Poems from Field Requiem have been published or are forthcoming in The Paris Review, PN Review, The Times Literary Supplement, Poetry Review, Brick, Prairie Fire, The Manchester Review and Grain Magazine.

Sheri grew up on a farm in central Saskatchewan, Treaty 6 Territory. She completed a PhD at the University of Glasgow and currently lives in Saskatoon where she teaches.

Field Requiem bears witness to the violence inherent in the shift to industrialised farming in prairie Canada...The poems give voice to the affective consequences of loss brought on by climate change and factory farming and renew a sense of locality in the teeth of corporate farming practices.

"Incantatory, rich with lived detail, Field Requiem's ceremony of naming resists the 'terrible forgetting' that's led Saskatchewan to a dangerous present and that threatens a bleaker future. Sheri Benning knows that love of place requires attention to all of it - to its history and to its dead, to sublimity and devastation, 'matted pasture grass / where a deer has lain' alongside Intercontinental Packers and the 'chemical burnoff after frost'. 'How strange', she writes, 'to find oneself at the end of it all'. This is a work of devotion, a lament and a prayer, an urgent, heartbroken, and beautiful book."

- Karen Solie