Benjamin Balthaser

Benjamin Balthaser is the author of Dedication (Partisan Press 2011) and Anti-Imperialist Modernism (U Mich 2016), and his poems and other critical work have appeared in journals such as Boston Review, Massachusetts Review, Minnesota Review, and elsewhere. He teaches multi-ethnic U.S. literature and lives in Chicago.

Fire Beetles

Their skin is the black ash of paper —they skim the still burning woods for a place to nest. I like to think of themlike a friend who can sense a crisis from a continent away: shefinds the breaking apart and blackening of a body eaten by its own heat and seesa place to grow. Their teeth have the hold… Read more →