The Psamathe Centre Journal (Vol. 827) is framed as the poetry edition of a centenary arts journal from Psamathe, a fictional inverted underwater city built upon the bones of a whale fall and populated by those displaced by the catastrophic failure of the Atlantropa dam. Within this elaborately constructed fictional world, poems attributed to various Psamathe Centre residents are presented as collaborations with the Sentient Room, a dream-state technology that translates the poet's abreactions into text, and which also, between sessions, illustrates and ultimately distorts what it has made. The collection's formal range is considerable, moving between lyric fragments, list poems, found forms, and visually malfunctioned pages in which the poems themselves are corrupted by the machine. Jack Bennett's achievement is to hold the playful architecture of the frame and the emotional weight of what it contains in genuine, unsettled tension.
 
PRAISE for The Psamathe Centre Journal (Vol. 827):
Jack Bennett's The Psamathe Centre Journal sinks us into a dream within a dream. We wander through its subconscious layers of poetry and mythology, where word mingles with image and colour, forming a narrative not of this world. These are, as its final page insists to us, poems of unrest. A real achievement.
   — Vanessa Onwuemezi
 
Like Calvino or Pessoa before him, Jack Bennett conjures entire cities, people and communities. With a ludic approach to the limitations of conceptualism, and an archivist's precision with fractalised detail, here is a writer easily able to transform reality and transpose the phantom that is history. Or, as Anne Sexton best said it, able to ‘fake it up with the truth’. Bennett brilliantly repurposes the past, fusing it into something stunning, but also imminently foreboding. We enter the futurecity of Psamathe as hypnospace. It is a place both written yet unwritten, where survival is the only way out.
   — James Byrne
 
ABOUT Jack Bennett:
Jack Bennett is a poet, short fiction writer, and artist based in Manchester. In 2022, he won the Edge Hill Vampire Bites competition with his poem ‘Fragments of Paole’, which was judged by Dacre Stoker, Bram Stoker’s great grand-nephew. His first publication was Lunette, a pamphlet of prose poetry published by Broken Sleep Books in 2023. The Psamathe Centre Journal is his first full collection of poetry.