Black Pastoral
poems, Ariana Benson
The University of Georgia Press, 2023
I give up on beauty. And then, and then. Ariana Benson’s Black Pastoral is an anti-next of verse that stuns and revives, that resurrects to retell. It names names and knows origin stories have only to be shared to rectify their shoddy beginnings. It is a work of shape and vindication, a work of worried syllable excavated by words gone awol from their bland enlistments. Wordplay is wordwork. Wordplay means. Atrocity says its peaceful piece. I’m not sure how to recite this. It was here and I arrived in the after non-image of a brutal stillness. Benson writes love poems to places no map can map. Its claim voids reclaiming with its re-reveal. Be floored, be lifted, sure. But return to be also returned.
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reflection by Barton Smock
kingsoftrain 
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