This collection is absolutely incredible. It took my breath away. Benson is thinking with so many Black writers–Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Christina Sharpe, Saidya Hartman, to name a few. The book is a collection of poems about the Black past, present, future, and how they weave together. It's about land, and the real people who lived on it, who made it. It’s a nature book, and it's beautiful, but it’s also painful beauty because Benson does not allow white supremacy and racial violence to be severed from the land. So the trees are trees that have known lynching, the plants are plants that grew up around plantations. Everywhere in nature are the ghosts of the violence done to Black people. And all around that, too, is the freedom and the lives and the stories and the magic and the love Black people have created on the land. So it feels like an anti-pastoral work, or an expansively pastoral work. The land does not exist without Blackness. 

There is a series of poems throughout the book all called "Love Poem in the Black Field" and they are all love stories with subtitles as to where and when they are set. And they are. So breathtaking. They are poems of refusal. I’m thinking about Spill by Alexis Pauline Gumbs and how that book felt like it was creating these spaces outside of time for Black life to flourish, and the "Love Poem in the Black Field" poems feel similar. They are poems of love taken, of freedom carved from this constrained space. They are grounded in these specific times and places, stated in the poem, and yet they also feel endless, partially because the Black field is both an imagined space and a physical one, a realm that exists across time and space. All these lovers across all these times are speaking to each other, are somehow both now and then, gone and here. There are all these questions I have, like what is the Black field and how have we ignored it as a country? The field has so many connotations. It is a place of violence, and yet the Black field in these poems is not a place of violence, though it doesn’t feel like a place of refuge exactly, or not always. It feels like a reckoning place, a truth place, a place where lovers go to be with the land in all its contradictions. 

The book is broken into sections, each with different parts of "Black Pastoral" highlighted, so it’s "Black Past", "Black As", and "Black Pastoral". There is this gorgeous music and movement in how the book holds together, how these sections feed off each other, how they are parts of a whole. 

I can’t stop thinking about the nature imagery in this book, which feels like it is lifting a veil. Like if we’re talking about fields we have to talk about the bodies that were murdered there, and if we’re talking about anything growing we’re talking about who did the growing, we’re talking about all the stuff that gets hidden in these pastoral landscapes. Somehow, though, the landscapes don’t become violent. What happens is that when Benson writes about landscapes and the violence done in them, the violence becomes clear. It’s the violence that stands out starkly, alongside the landscapes. There’s something here I can’t quite put my finger on but it’s so big and interesting, this idea of separating things in order to see them truly and then putting them back together.

My brain is exploding thinking about how big and smart this book is, the way it tells a story about America that is fugitive and freedom and reckoning, that condemns while also sort of…not rising above, but this book doesn’t concern itself with whiteness, it’s interested in the spaces and beauties Blackness makes.