Black Pastoral is not playing nice. In this landscape, even sweetness stings. On every page you'll stumble over an image, a line, a truth, that will take your breath away. These poems refuse to paint ‘nature’ as a beautiful, healing space untouched by human hungers, violences, and losses. Ariana Benson uses all the linguistic wizardry, emotional honesty, and formal dazzle at her disposal to bring us the fields and forests as she finds them: colonized, exploited, but still wild, and filled with what history has made Blackness mean.
—Evie Shockley, author of semiautomatic

Lucille Clifton wonders, when writing about trees, 'why/ is there under that poem always/ an other poem? Ariana Benson answers Clifton in Black Pastoral with a series of poems that see the land as both dungeon against and co-conspirator to Black freedom. In poems blossoming into traditional and nonce forms, where the Black imagination is a reluctant crypt, Benson writes, 'There are some trees—the black mangrove, the longleaf pine—that cannot bear the loneliness of touch.' These poems touch the ancestors with love and witness.
—Phillip B. Williams, author of Mutiny

Boll weevil and blessing, spade and sweet field, tulip and tobacco; all these and more thrive miraculously, rivered through Benson's Black Pastoral, a luminous forest of aubade, elegy, and voracious vision. These vibrant and stunning poems take us from indigo-pitted Cape Coast passages to sticky-knuckled oil spills with awe, insight, and an earthen solemnity. Here is a pastoral Blackened, billowing, heaved with history and blooming throughout with the possibility of a myriad of answers to the question what has apocalypse taught us/ but how to live/ unwholly?
—Tyehimba Jess, author of Pulitzer Prize-winning Olio