Illustrated Games of Patience

“This beautiful work of late Romanticism finds Estes often roaming, sometimes making his bed in uncomfortable places … The poems speak in riddles, impossible questions, vivid sensuous description, and, on one page, doggerel.” –Aaron Kunin

What exactly is an illustrated game of patience? Imagine something like group solitaire within a room full of objects, Duchamp on a TV, some great old albums, voices from a radio or the past and a set of reverberating cymbals. In Ben Estes’s Illustrated Games of Patience, the game involves sorting through objects and landscapes to reveal their “soft hums of isolation,” often in the wake of love. If there is winning involved, the rewards are hope for renewal and a “faith in arranging.” Filled with color and light, these poems make vivid the tender details of close observation, “urging love to stretch and green.”
Ben Estes lives in Kingston, New York. He worked as the editor of A Dark Dreambox of Another Kind: The Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton (with Alan Felsenthal); Together & Alone, the photographs of Karlheinz Weinberger; and the poetry anthology On The Mesa: An Anthology of Bolinas Writing (The Song Cave, 2021). He has most recently shown his paintings at Situations Gallery and Paula Cooper Gallery, both in New York.