laura_sackton's Reviews (170)

The braided back and forth structure is perfect.
So much about how love and bodies and gender and attraction intersect!
Loved it.

So gorgeous, so breathtaking.
Mysterious and whole.
All the weather. Such glittering sentences.

This book is almost entirely long prose poems, many several pages. I found it very opaque. Sentence after sentence that I could not understand. This is not always a bad thing for me, with poetry!

My favorite was a poem of paragraphs named by the lat/longitude of a place, exploring the history of migrants in AZ, as well as a national wildlife refuge, police and border violence, and Morgan and a friend spending time in nature in this wild preserve. It felt very stark and beautiful, how these different  ideas blend together. 

In general the book is very much about borders, who creates them, how they operate, natural and human borders, how they interact. It is about the AZ desert and the history of violence it makes clear and also hides: past and present violence toward Indigenous people and migrants. It's about how to live in a place like this, or love in a place like this, which is a place that is anywhere, but is, of course, so specific to these poems.

Sometimes I really love being lost in a book; it depends on my frame of mind while reading. I love the different ways she writes about nature, especially about what happens in deserts, both the natural and human cycles and how those cycles do and do not intersetc. I like how she positions herself, and humans, as somewhat small in the desert but also crucial, it’s a twisting of landscapes and people and lives and how things bloom or die. There is a lot of long, long time in this book—bodies decaying, landscapes shifting, ecologies changing, borders being built, sometimes in concrete ways like a wall, and in other ways by cultural norms, by habit.

Incandescent. Transcendent.
A brilliant gift of a book.

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. 

I will never think about recipes the same way again.
Thinky and visceral.
Loved.

An absolutely brilliant book about trans sisterhood.
So funny and so tender.
Wept, laughed, adored.

The most loving and messy family.
The warmest book.
I adored every flawed human in this novel.

I loved everything about these two queer Maori Russian siblings and their big chaotic family. The family! There are a million branches, they live in various countries, an this intricate web of biological and found, the family sprawls. They are related in complicated ways—by blood, choice, happenstance. This family is full of secrets and mistakes and loss but more than anything else they love each other.

That is what I keep coming back to, how deeply Greta and Valdin are loved by their big family, their parents and sibling and each other but also their extended family. There is so much love between all these people, and that doesn’t mean they're perfect. They don’t see each other, they hurt each other, they mess up, they are oblivious or protect each other in the wrong way, they don’t want to be around each other, they deal with various mental health stuff and emotional stuff and a other million things, and through it all, they love each other. I think this is actually hard to write, this kind of family that is so good but fucks up plenty, this family where there is present trauma and ancestral trauma, where the parents haven’t done a perfect job and the kids are struggling, but still: love, openness. 

I also loved how easy the romance is.

Valdin gets back together with his boyfriend, that is his main plot arc. He broke up with this man a year before in the midst of career crisis, quit his PhD, and could not explain to his boyfriend why he was so upset and angry. And when they get back together he’s had the time to figure himself out, to get to a different place in his life, to be on his own enough to see what he wants outside of his relationship. So their reunion is just really soft and lovely and serious from the start. I found it charming but not overly sentimental because it felt so real, it was so deeply about timing and that is real, like, sometimes you can’t do two things at once. The romance is this beautiful example of how Valdin couldn’t do his career and his relationship at once, he had to pause one to find some steadiness in the other, and sometimes pausing will change how you feel about someone, but not always, and not in this case,

I loved how it came together. 

I also love that Greta has this love interest she just gets along with from the beginning. There are no big problems, which is something I find boring in romances novels, but I did not find it boring here because I loved watching as she tumbled around living her life which was sometimes great and sometimes a mess and sometimes boring and sometimes awesome. This book reminded me that with the right characters who the hell cares what goes on! I could have read a book twice as long about these two siblings just doing their thing. 

Also, there are SO MANY QUEER SIBLINGS!

Maybe my favorite poetry collection of the year so far?
Absolutely stunning.
The precision of language, the play of language. It destroyed me.