Ariana Benson is a Southern Black ecopoet. Their debut collection, Black Pastoral (University of Georgia Press, 2023) won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Leonard Prize. Benson is a 2023 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow. Her poems appear in Poetry, Ploughshares, Poem-a-Day, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. Through her writing, Benson strives to fashion vignettes of Blackness that speak to its infinite depth and richness.
Nature's Nature
Summer 2024
Pastoral in the Mode of Bob Ross
Like God, we begin with the heavens. Dip our brush in the lightest colors, let the darker hues run down toward our blanched canvas ground. A simple scene: alizarin crimson, […]
Nature's Nature
Summer 2024
on loveliness
i read somewhere that a group of ladybugs is called a loveliness. and i wonderwhat the person who gave themthat name (surely someone of at least measurable humanity) knew,or thought […]
Nature's Nature
Summer 2024
Meditation on the Nature of Sound and Its Absence
Every day, dogs bark at me in my building’s garage. Dogs bark at each other. At seemingly nothing at all. I wonder how they must sound to themselves. In my […]
Nature's Nature
Summer 2024
Encounter
Not cotton, but the snowthat resembled it piling upin balled fists on the deadbranches. Not the music —worldly, natural — the sound-track itself, but the wayit melted everything around it down to its […]
Fiction
Black Estrangement
Sho-Gang: The Legend of Black Fandom
FADE IN: A single plume of smoke rises at the edge of a steep, rocky cliff. We ZOOM OUT to see the land in the valley below, a camp of […]