Object Permanence: Poems

by Nica Bengzon

An urgent debut by poet Nica Bengzon, demanding a reckoning with what it means to be healthy against a backdrop of widespread illness and violence. Selected as the third winner of the annual Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize (2020) by Singapore Literature Prize-winning poet Cyril Wong.



At the heart of Nica Bengzon's timely collection is a bold challenge to our understanding of health. Using the language of medicine and psychology, Bengzon probes for ironies and conflicts in these fields and their professed capacity to provide care through control and scientific truth. A truly interdisciplinary experiment, Object Permanence at once embraces and refuses the scientific method, repeatedly testing what it means to have hope amid grief, illness, violence, and survival. Subtle yet potent, philosophical yet grounded, clinical yet intimate, Bengzon's poems expose the limits of healing in its institutionalized and professionalized forms.




"You wonder why it feels as though you're playing peek-a-boo with a wall, why the baby doesn't laugh. I hate this game. I always have, because it's a magic trick I can't see inside of, no more than you can read the signs in my head. The question of your existence is too grave to tickle my funny bone. When I take the steel balls of my fists to your arms, remember this is the only way my youngest self knows how to love, always half-terrified of things it can't see."

Genres: Poetry

136 pages, Paperback

First published March 31, 2021

Reviews

[☆subin☆ · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is why I read poetry. someone has the same brain as me. I can't believe you wrote my book. shook. active listening and all of that.

[Keana Labra · Rating 5 out of 5]

To move through life is to attempt to find a sense of balance and structure. With Nica Bengzon’s Object Permanence, we witness poetry and its marriage to process. Every part in the poems of this collection are precise and deliberate, making the turn all the more impactful. Bengzon’s writing is a microscope; she invites the reader to the smallest detail, leaving us gasping by the time we get to the big picture. She defies any who would argue science and theory cannot be poetry. It rings in such a calculated beauty, akin to Katherine Larson’s poem, “Love at Thirty-Two Degrees.” Where, even grief, is broken down into a dissection of energy, and its conclusion, “the principle of the thing is forever.” All are scrutinized in this space, family, bodies, animals, and religion. There is a variety in form with her poetry, a refreshing visual seeming to portray her layout of thought. We are solving these equations with her, and these arrangements make her work even more breathtaking. Bengzon is a physicist with her poetry, transforming matter into anew, bringing new possibilities to the genre of poetry with her work.

[Naro · Rating 4 out of 5]

What I treasure most in poetry, is honesty. Honesty found in the sleights-of-hand, in the spaces between fingers (as the poet tenderly put it "you only realize the thing you have lost by examining the shape of the space it left behind"), underneath the skin, in the blood that moves through each poem--the breath, iron, and life that weaves each word together, like time, memory, and age.

What's it like to be in this world, and to grow holding ourselves up?

I love the anger, and at times, wanted it to be freed from the careful and "scientific" language--but I also felt the words would spill from clenched/gritted teeth.

I am left wanting more. More of what's left unsaid. A book for any reader, any person grappling with hope and despair, especially for those of us reckoning with mental health, and those in the mental health profession.

Daghang salamat sa makatha sa biyaya ng panahon, na makipagpalagayang loob sa mga tulang ito.

[Nico · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phenomenal.
I was apprehensive picking this up, seeing poetry is something that has been held out of my reach by the way school introduced it to me. But enjoying poetry can be standing at the mailbox devouring poem after poem instead of walking upstairs. Sprawling over the carpet unable to look away, haunted and awed and with my emotions stirred like ingredients in a blender (affectionate).
Could not have asked for a better 'baby's first poetry collection' on my shelf.

[Carole · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m still agape, to be honest. Poetry written with such piercing clarity and yet, when you get to the end it’s only then that the words truly find their mark.
The words written are powerful but often they tell of the power of the spoken word and how carelessly language is used and the harm it can inflict.
The three poems which have stuck with me since finishing are ‘Object Permanence’, ‘Active Listening’ and ‘The Heart of The Blue Whale’ - all three painted vivid pictures in my mind.