Sheri Benning’s most recent collection of poetry, Field Requiem, was published by Carcanet Press in Fall 2021.
Poems from Field Requiem appeared 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
Carcanet Press
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
"Sheri Benning’s Field Requiem is the very kind of poetry we need in dark times. Its careful, precise language brings truth to the propaganda of common interchange in the media that so often obscures who we are, our common ideals and compassion."
- Trevor Herriot
The Season's Vagrant Light:
New & Selected Poems
Carcanet Press
"These poems stop the heart and recharge the senses…They seem to be teaching language fresh tricks of reception to catch the quick of experience."
- Don McKay
"Empathy and compassion are intellectual nourishment in this work, which at the same time fiercely contemplates how we are, even when among others, our own relentless companions."
- Karen Solie
Thin Moon Psalm
Brick Books
“...Sheri Benning performs an uncanny trick: she uses words as a means of hearing as well as saying things. As we read her graceful generous poems we join with her in drinking the world in – its darkness and loveliness and nameless potencies.”
- John Steffler
“…[T]he prairie landscape and sky-world, the temporality of passionate human connection; the physicality of memory and grief are the deep streams of metaphor this book engages. Sheri Benning is a marvel of a poet.”
- Sharon Thesen
Earth After Rain
Thistledown Press
“This first book of poems shows striking sensitivity to the verve and resonance of words, with openness to sensual and exploratory language…”
- Erin Mouré
“Sheri Benning's poems are born alive on the page; they're surprising, fresh, evocative of prairie landscape and bursting with emotional intelligence. I feel both smarter and wiser after entering her world…”- Susan Musgrave
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