Conceptualization

Conceptualization is a collection of poems about the strange machinery by which human beings make meaning: through memory, love, art, grief, language, belief, color, mathematics, philosophy, and the ordinary objects surrounding us.Moving between the intimate and the cosmic, Ben Folk finds questions of existence in parking lots, childhood bedrooms, paintings, relationships, television, medicine, history, birds, stones, and the night sky. Familiar things repeatedly become unfamiliar; abstract ideas become physical; and moments that initially seem small open onto questions much larger than themselves.At times playful, dark, tender, absurd, or unsettling, these poems resist explaining the world into submission. Instead, Conceptualization explores the distance between what is there and what the mind makes of it-and what happens when two people look at the same world and see something entirely different.