Vital Congruities
Rose Higham-Stainton, Los Angeles Review of Books
February 2025
In Fish out of Water, Bennett reflects on the irrecoverable loss that occurs after childhood. Not a loss of innocence, or of self as ‘I,’but a loss of the imagination, something that the author retrieves one day when she stumbles across an exhibition of works by the late surrealist painter Dorothea Tanning in Madrid, or as she puts it: ‘I saw your name across the entrance to a large building.’ Bennett was in Spain’s capital trying and failing to bring ‘hundreds of sham words’ to life—words that would one day become Checkout 19—while also grieving her grandmother, a formidable presence in Fish out of Water and a kind of touchstone throughout Bennett’s work. Meeting Tanning’s work again produced in Bennett ‘a feeling of kindredness,’ a sense that ‘perhaps seeing [Tanning], through the metamorphosis of [her] rupturing canvases and fugacious sculptures, would show me something—would in fact restore to me that essential source which had become so small and distant and faded.’ […]