A miniature city constructed entirely of trash. An Explorer’s Club, where an artist transforms conquest to artifice through the striking use of color. A squirrel cage where dead and poisoned thoughts ricochet like Bingo balls. A forest growing inside a gallery, complete with a living raccoon. These are just a few of the modern art landscapes, real and imaged, in Amy Benson’s Seven Years to Zero , a collection of linked vignettes that blurs the line between fiction and memoir. In a narrative divided into seven years, the collection traces on couple’s move to the metropolis, and their struggle with the decision of having a child in a world of factories, earthquakes, pollution, extinction, nuclear fallout and uncertain future. Through the lens of one couple, one city, and one child, Benson explores how art shapes awareness, and how awareness shapes our understanding of our place in a changing world. “Benson captures the paranoia and search for escape that is found in much of contemporary life. She does so with beautiful language and a unique approach, joining in the tradition of great “art as life” works as The Horse’s Mouth and Letters on Cezanne .” ― JMWW “Benson employs a poetic approach to language, making the natural world flicker and animate itself through lyrical precision and powerful images.” ― The Rumpus “Like Calvino, Benson has created a book that eludes easy classification, its contents part personal essay and part ekphrastic prose poem. But rather than using invented cities or dreams as a framework to explore human behavior, she looks to art, both real and imagined, to illuminate our fears and desires.” ― Guernica "Perception and imagination come together thrillingly in Amy Benson's beautiful sentences. The city is shown as a gallery, where the line between daily life and artwork tantalizingly thins. 'We live in the middle of perpetual construction,' she writes, and so her book accrues, trusting to not-knowing and speculation to arrive at a place where everything counts." ―Phillip Lopate, author of A Mother's Tale “An essential book for these dark and terrifying times. Benson writes brilliantly and tenderly about what it means to make art when everything is falling to pieces around you.” ―Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation “Benson has conjured that most reluctant of ghosts: the ghost of the present, the one with the most startling and strange news to report of all. These essays are at once companionable and ingenious, with a vision that feels extraterrestrial and also wholly ours.” ―Rivka Galchen, Atmospheric Disturbances Praise for The Sparkling-Eyed Boy "While the words "what if" may be the most potent daydream triggers known to humanity, writers usually explore the road-not-taken in the format of fiction. Benson's Bakeless Prize-winning work of "creative nonfiction" comprises some 32 entries relating to the "sparkling-eyed boy" of her teen years, her first big love. ... So this is a memoir, then, of what did not happen." ― Publishers Weekly "[Her] poetic memoir...built on dreams and memories of what never happened, but could have...." ― USA Today "A provocative, intense read." ― Booklist, ALA "Startling insight and precision...a potent meditation on love, summer, youth, and how the three intertwine." ― Body&Soul Amy Benson is the author of The Sparkling-Eyed Boy (Houghton Mifflin 2004), winner of the Bakeless Prize in creative nonfiction, sponsored by Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference. Recent work has appeared in journals such as Agni, BOMB, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, PANK, and Triquarterly. She has taught creative writing at Columbia University and Fordham University and will join the writing faculty at Rhodes College in Memphis in the fall. She was a fellow at Bread Loaf and a resident at Ledig House International, and is the co-founder of the First Person Plural Reading Series in Harlem.