Available for purchase at indie bookstores like Powell’s, McNally Jackson, Book Culture, as well as Bookshop.org and Amazon.

Praise for For the Love of Endings

“Purkert highlights a familiar paradox of human life. We are both radically connected to, and yet disconnected from, our physical bodies.” — New York Times

“Ben Purkert’s poems aren’t just concerned with intelligent life—they are intelligent life.”  — AGNI

"[A] perceptive debut... The collection pings with delightful precision between the objects that connect people and those that divide." — Publishers Weekly

"The unique, unsettling mix of clarity and dread throughout is what will bring readers back and back to this book... Every line is constructed in such a way that it could be the last line, as though the speaker knows we may have little time together." — Kenyon Review

"Purkert... demonstrates with each poem a new thing we are capable of losing, slowly stripping away what we are comprised of in an attempt to uncover the fundamentally human: that which cannot be taken away." — Flypaper Magazine

“Reading Ben Purkert’s debut collection of poetry, For the Love of Endings, I can’t help but to imagine a scene where a brokenhearted man, recently out of a relationship, drinks a glass of Clos du Bois chardonnay at the Olive Garden in Times Square with a good friend as he unfurls his feelings about his ex. Perhaps the relationship has been over for a few weeks, enough time for some clarity and acceptance to wade into his thoughts, but there’s still an underlying rawness, tinged with anger, to meander into the conversation. The server comes over with a Coca-Cola on the house, along with a refresh of never-ending breadsticks. The sad man looks out to the stars, obscured by the New York City lights, and wonders what his ex is doing.” — Colorado Review

"I want this book to float out into the cosmos to reach future and existing forms of intelligence—to let them know there was at least one beautiful/difficult, dark/brilliant side to us earthlings.” — Brenda Shaughnessy

"For the Love of Endings is a tremendous beginning. It marks the arrival of a singular voice.” — Eduardo C. Corral

"This is a poetry that makes a place for the tangential, the trace, the touch, a tomorrow.” — Maureen N. McLane