“Webs” is a most practical poem by Katy Bentall from her forthcoming Greenwriting collection (Bored Wolves, May), which brings together Katy’s writing and artwork about life in the Polish countryside. “Webs” is read by Magda Tchorek-Bentall with clarity and gravity befitting the seriousness of this public service announcement: how to avoid demolishing a spider’s home, its living room, pantry, shadowed inverse solarium, and countless spools of heirloom gossamer.
There are a number of pieces in Greenwriting which, in addition to being lyrically lovely to read, contain Useful Information: a prose dispatch from the marketplace in town includes a handy bilingual Polish–English chart breaking down Honey Man’s “complex, color-coded lid system for denoting the different types and blends of honey” he sells in jars. A diaristic entry about the psychic bullying of a “menacing cabbage” doubles as a recipe for a delicious salad of slain cabbage, onions, apples, salt and pepper, brown sugar, and feta.
And in “Webs,” Katy Bentall pivots to the perspective of a spider to explain that whereas a cobweb is a “dust web / an abandoned house,” a web is not abandoned at all, but the spider’s “fresh and dewy construct” of a home.
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We will be launching a pre-order campaign for Greenwriting in the coming days via www.greenwriting.ink, a link which currently leads to a preview of the campaign (exact launch date to be confirmed shortly).
In the meantime, here are two more Greenwriting recordings:
