Meditation on the Nature of Sound and Its Absence

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.