I sought to create a form combining visual art and writing, and so this series of bilingual contrapuntal paint erasures was born. The Locura Azul suite, named after a song by Cuban filin group Los Zafiros, are an attempt to write "poems that are the sea." I don't know if I succeeded. I know them as an attempt, a glimmering broken blue gem, something like the ever-shifting coastlines I grew up on and am forever chasing.
E.R. Pulgar on Multiple Poems |
|
|
"Aída Esmeralda Interviews Ariana Benson"
"Black Pastoral is a collection that treks us through various Black temporalities, desires, and harbors as Benson invites us to sit with a euphony of southernBlack voices and the lives they intimately and radically pave(d) for themselves. Structured in three parts (Black Past, Black as, and Black __), Black Pastoral is a project that nurtures and tends to the Black imagination, subverting the conventions of romantic pastorals and ecopoetry to allow the southern Virginia landscape to transform into a palimpsest of Black life, where often the speaker asks, 'what new life can there be/without forgetting/those given over/to flame?'"
via HAYDEN'S FERRY REVIEW |
|
|
What Sparks Poetry:
Jonathan Skinner on "Unfolder"
"I suppose the poem downplays metamorphosis, and all its metaphorical associations, compressing the monarch’s ontogeny, from egg to larva or caterpillar molting through its instars eating their own shed skin to pupal stage with its cremaster to chrysalis and finally butterfly, into one stanza, like those time-lapse photography films we all watched in school. Instead, 'Unfolder' dilates on the risky moment of sexual encounter." |
|
|
|
|
|
|
