The Psamathe Centre Journal (Vol. 827): Centenary Edition No 2: Poetry

The Psamathe Centre Journal (Vol. 827) is framed as the poetry edition of a centenary arts journal from Psamathe, a fictional inverted underwater city built upon the bones of a whale fall and populated by those displaced by the catastrophic failure of the Atlantropa dam. Within this elaborately constructed fictional world, poems attributed to various Psamathe Centre residents are presented as collaborations with the Sentient Room, a dream-state technology that translates the poet's abreactions into text, and which also, between sessions, illustrates and ultimately distorts what it has made. The collection's formal range is considerable, moving between lyric fragments, list poems, found forms, and visually malfunctioned pages in which the poems themselves are corrupted by the machine. Jack Bennett's achievement is to hold the playful architecture of the frame and the emotional weight of what it contains in genuine, unsettled tension.