Cadet (Pre-order)
$18Poems by Benjamin Bellet. Perfect bound paperback. First edition, 2025.
Cadet opens in the freezing cold of Ranger School, the US Army’s most difficult combat leadership course. The poems proceed through the intricate wreckage of deployment and return, family and erotic life, masculine performance and intrapsychic reality, dreaming and waking. A graduate of West Point, veteran of two combat deployments, and Harvard-trained clinical psychologist, Benjamin Bellet sheds new light on the veteran experience in the post-9/11 era with language that integrates psychoanalytic nuance, lyrical pathos, and the graffiti of the barracks latrine.
“An exemplary collection with very remarkable capture of time and tone. The fear of an ineluctable doom through training and deployment and deployment. Worst two words in the American language: ‘overseas levy.’ Do you recall the cartoon ads, someone obliviously facing an inescapable horror? And someone else asks ‘Who’s your insurance company?’ ‘Why . . . New York Life, of course . . . Why do you ask?’ I was sorry there were not more poems to read in this all too short book and I look forward to a non-chapbook sized edition.”
— Michael Casey
“These are poems of strange intimacies, of the tight knot of pleasure, dread, and shame, of the ‘blank moan,’ the thrust and burst, of nights when the bruise feels right because it means that something happened. Benjamin Bellet shows the way the hot fist of violence clutches inside itself the ‘unbearable softnesses.’ He is attuned to the emptiness at the center of things and with tenderness and rigor he reaches toward this place. Cadet is a work of force and grace. I want to read Benjamin Bellet for a long time to come.”
— Nina MacLaughlin
“Benjamin Bellet’s Cadet explores the layered interiority of a life, with a lyric eye attuned to tenderness, the unspoken moments that glimmer in a life, as well as the invisible tethers that bind and unravel between lovers, family, and fellow comrades in arms. Bellet’s poems are crafted with a deft hand, a mature touch, and a deep respect for the reader’s intellect. It’s a collection that adds to the literature and it’s one that will gather no dust on the shelf—as I’ll return to Bellet’s poems often in the years ahead.”
— Brian Turner