Monster: A Guardian, Telegraph, Brittle Paper and open country Book of the Year, 2024
'This is an amazing collection, not only for a debut but for a poet at any stage. It’s versatile and virtuosic, experimental and moving, complex and culturally important.' – Bernardine Evaristo, author of Girl, Woman, Other, winner of the Booker Prize, 2019
’[…] dazzles in its range, technique and imagination’ - Rishi Dastidar, The Guardian, The Best Poetry Books of 2024
‘Historical figures inspired two distinctive debuts […] while Dzifa Benson’s impressive Monster (Bloodaxe) finds belated justice for the “Hottentot Venus” Sarah Baartman, a Khoekhoe woman brought to 19th-century London and displayed as a curiosity.’ – Tristram Fane Saunders, the Telegraph, The Best Poetry Books of 2024
‘Confronting themes of race, gender, and the monstrous in society, this poetry collection is both visceral and mythological, […] It packs an almighty punch.’ – Chaya Colman and Sophie Ezra, Glamour, 25 best new books of October 2024
’Benson is sharp on what it means to have a body. She shows bodily animalness, its flesh, as well as the weight – literal and figurative – of gaining notoriety for having one. […] Then there are poems written in the voice of Baartman herself: a mix of Khoekhoe dialect words and euphonic, often musical, phrasing.’ – Declan Ryan, The Telegraph, Poetry Book of the Month, October 2024
‘Benson's debut explores the Black female body as both a site of oppression and resilience. Anchored by poems on Sarah Baartman’s life, Monster presents Benson’s own experiences with lyricism, Ewe mythology, and Shakespearean echoes.’ – Brittle Paper, 100 Notable African Books of 2024
’The tactile language and eclectic techniques take the breath away, with the book featuring playlets, remixes of quotes from Enlightenment thinkers such as Descartes, even a poem layered on to a reproduction of a fragment of a genome. Imaginative, rigorous and playful, this is a showstopper of a debut.' – Rishi Dastidar, The Guardian, Poetry Books of the Month, October 2024
’British-Ghanaian poet Benson’s history of Sarah Baartman gives Baartman a voice and some agency within the constraints of her terrible abduction and exploitation. This is, in the words of the publisher, “a bold and lyrical exploration of the Black female body as a site of oppression and resistance’. - Jacqueline Nyathi, The Continent
’Monster is a deeply felt experience, a journey into the monstrous feminine (how much more so when that feminine is marked by dark skin). It unsettles, confronts, challenges. If you buy a copy, it will sit on your shelf and haunt you. Reader, that’s a good thing.’ - Harare Review of Books
'Yes, there is a knowledge of injustice, a passionate linguistic response and at the same time a wonderful skill of sensual language that makes this world bearable in Dzifa Benson’s poems. Yes, there is also an unmistakable gift of inventiveness and joy (via playfulness, via humour) of speech in Dzifa Benson’s poems. There, too, at the same time, is deep awareness of kinship with ancestral spirits that comes not through mere figures of speech but also through what makes us speak, what makes words a music, a tune, more magnetic than just the given meanings these words signify. What appeals most to me, in the end, is the wisdom that one feels lives in this language, in its imagery: a kind of clarity of perspective that is uncommon. Take, for instance, this: “Sycamores know that not everything has the luxury of roots,” she writes. “Their masterstroke is knowing they carry the seeds of greatness within.” Indeed. It is this clarity of knowing that gives these words their inimitable heft, I feel. That allows one a clarity of watching one’s species, even one’s body. My evidence? Here: “This body is an underwater cave whose lungs I cannot drain while I wait for air to become breath.” It is fascinating, indeed, to follow the Benson poem, whether the poem is playful or serious – or often both, at once! – there is a kind of knowing that’s always unexpected in its unfolding, and always welcome. I love this poet’s work.' - Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic, chosen by the BBC as “one of 12 artists that changed the world”
'Dzifa Benson’s collection is so many things, a careful unfurling and retelling of the story of Saartjie Baartman; deeply penetrating as it is intelligent as it is compassionate…the pages in this book contain a carefully controlled rage allied to an attention to language, form and music. This debut announces a vital new voice; Dzifa Benson is a brilliantly original poet who refuses to turn away, who resolves to commit to write into the pain and horrors of our buried histories. This is an exceptional debut.' – Mona Arshi, author of Small Hands and Somebody Loves You
'In Dzifa Benson’s poems something that seemed lost is now found, the familiar becomes strange again and we’re guided through a wilderness that blossoms before our eyes as the poet strikes rock after rock of ancestral grief and crystalline revelations stream forth.' – Lorna Goodison, former Poet Laureate of Jamaica
''Monster is the most alive book I’ve read, it makes me cry, laugh and rage. Dzifa Benson is a genius, she brings to light the suffering and defiance of the Hottentot Venus, the richness of Ewe culture, and neglected paintings of Black men, with verve, erudition, and a Shakespearean vibrancy. This is an extraordinary debut, its themes are major and urgent: the decolonisation of the mind, and the empowering of the female Black body in European culture that historically has devalued it. The result is an explosive and original masterwork.' – Pascale Petit, author of Mama Amazonica winner of the RSL Ondaatje Prize and Laurel Prize for Poetry
'The language of Dzifa Benson’s poetic universe is bodily & boldly made: sonic, potent and kickingly alive.' – Tishani Doshi, Forward Prize winning author of Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods
