Praise for She Was Wild Grass​​

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​“Katie Bennett’s search for Joan Vollmer is also a search for herself and her own place in the world. She Was Wild Grass is a powerful homage not just to Vollmer but to all those whose spirits and lives have been left out of the canon or otherwise neglected, excised. The book is candid and always compelling. I could not put it down.”

— Chris Kraus, author of The Four Spent the Day Together​

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“Brilliant…I gulped this book down. It’s dense with narrative and goes down like spring water. I couldn’t stop reading it.”

— Sarah Manguso, author of Liars

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"Bennett’s artistic excavation of Vollmer’s tragic life is a wresting-back of control, a callback to her own assault. Writing this manuscript was a reclamation of power after the loss of it. By considering how Vollmer’s treatment in the history of the Beat movement has served to disempower her and remove her agency, while at the same time exposing the latent cultural factors that contribute to the ubiquity of gendered harm or erasure, Bennett seeks to resurrect Vollmer’s legacy as she claims her own."

 — Gina Tomaine, Los Angeles Review of Books

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“Katie Bennett has a voice that takes your hands gently but firmly, looks you in the eyes, and speaks. That's the feeling I had reading her debut memoir. Profound intimacy. Profound generosity. She Was Wild Grass tangles an unvarnished look at Bennett's late-20s—full of the terrors of getting older, of not being happy, of longing to make art-with the story of Joan Vollmer, the Beat Generation woman killed by her famous husband, William S. Burroughs, at 28. In shard-like paragraphs, Bennett recovers Vollmer's story, finds Vollmer in herself, finds herself in Vollmer, and lives all of it on the page. I'm a reader who's won over by the sentences, and Bennett's are simply exquisite. I can't recommend reading them enough.”

— Willem Marx, Associate Editor, Electric Literature’s “What We’re Reading This Summer”

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“This bracing braided memoir—in the tradition of Kate Zambreno’s Heroines—tracks the author’s artistic evolution alongside her research into the fascinating yet tragic life of Joan Vollmer. Bennett attempts to excavate Vollmer from her scantily recorded history to reveal her as an influential artist of the Beat movement, for which her husband and murderer William Burroughs would be remembered. In this book, Bennett makes a compelling argument that the archivist’s duty is to dust off tired, surface-level assignations of creative influence and material output to reveal counterhistories that bear a much closer semblance to the truth … Overall, this is a promising feminist work from an artist-researcher who hails from Out of Academia. Amen to that.”

— Charlie Jones, Bookseller & Otherwise Award Liaison

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