Through seamless and crafty associative leaps that leave the reader racing to catch up, El Bentivegna lets us pace along the snake-like coils of their poetic mind. Bentivegna’s anxieties, preoccupations, and fixations slide beautifully from one line to the next, and words take on double meanings, eschewing the punctuation that would just slow them down. We are faced with “creek birth[s],” “hyperfem tradwife / egirl instapoet[s],” “dead / mouse’s entrails,” and killer moons, a request from a husband not to “feed on yourself.” Bentivegna’s Confirm Humanity captures the meandering no-where-to-go-ness of Trump’s post-pandemic America; they do so with a modern poetic flair, a barrage of the pain of thinking, “making it about / me and not the music.”
Adriana Beltrano
Confirm Humanity is a searing, litanic whir: a looping meditation, a vibration attuned to the melodious glitch in reality’s artificiality. El Bentivegna renders the sifting materiality of language and associative thought with acute precision. They write, “mark my / words i’m not not / a machine,” yet Bentivegna is a deft mechanic of sound, continually recalibrating fragments trembling toward truth. This work enacts the radical acceptance of contradiction—real life and recovery in all their stuttering utterances.
Kristen Tetzmann
El Bentivegna is a poetry candidate in the NEOMFA program through Cleveland State. They were the recipient of the 2025 Academy of American Poets University and College Poetry Prize. Their work can be found in HAD, *82 Review, and others. El works at the Cleveland Public Library and lives in Cleveland Heights with their husband and their four cats.
Through seamless and crafty associative leaps that leave the reader racing to catch up, El Bentivegna lets us pace along the snake-like coils of their poetic mind. Bentivegna’s anxieties, preoccupations, and fixations slide beautifully from one line to the next, and words take on double meanings, eschewing the punctuation that would just slow them down. We are faced with “creek birth[s],” “hyperfem tradwife / egirl instapoet[s],” “dead / mouse’s entrails,” and killer moons, a request from a husband not to “feed on yourself.” Bentivegna’s Confirm Humanity captures the meandering no-where-to-go-ness of Trump’s post-pandemic America; they do so with a modern poetic flair, a barrage of the pain of thinking, “making it about / me and not the music.”
Adriana Beltrano
Confirm Humanity is a searing, litanic whir: a looping meditation, a vibration attuned to the melodious glitch in reality’s artificiality. El Bentivegna renders the sifting materiality of language and associative thought with acute precision. They write, “mark my / words i’m not not / a machine,” yet Bentivegna is a deft mechanic of sound, continually recalibrating fragments trembling toward truth. This work enacts the radical acceptance of contradiction—real life and recovery in all their stuttering utterances.
Kristen Tetzmann
El Bentivegna is a poetry candidate in the NEOMFA program through Cleveland State. They were the recipient of the 2025 Academy of American Poets University and College Poetry Prize. Their work can be found in HAD, *82 Review, and others. El works at the Cleveland Public Library and lives in Cleveland Heights with their husband and their four cats.
Title: Confirm Humanity
Author: El Bentivegna
Publisher: Rockwood Press
Released: 2025 - December
Format: chapbook, acid-free paper, silk cover
Pages: 32
Price: $10
ISBN: 978-1-59498-196-8
