In A Green Shade is Rick Benjamin’s latest attempt to bring increased attention to connections between human and much-more-than-human worlds, in poem-snapshots that document both multi-cultural human and ecological realities, collapses of various kinds, as well as a visceral and vibrant sentience which can’t help sustaining itself. These poems link the local and mundane miracles of daily living to both the global and mystical possibilities that come with living on this planet “in the winters of this climate” (Adrienne Rich, from “Power”). Like Sharon Olds, but without her microscopic powers of observation, he has always longed to believe in what he is seeing.

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“I am very moved by Rick Benjamin’s poems— I love his subjects, his style, his whole sensibility.”
—Naomi Shihab Nye

Some Bodies in the Grief Bed is Rick Benjamin’s latest attempt to find the intersection of the human and the non-human in the context of this earth’s ecology. A poem about migrations butterflies and others make might be followed by another appearing in the life of a family; and this poet is always trying to face down the distinction between them. At the same time, he is deeply interested in every detail of either: giraffe’s eating an Acacia’s topmost leaves and pods; the way the sound of percussive roofs in rain bring up memories a boy might have thought he’d buried. These are offered as equal parts of one book, planets orbiting around the same sun. As the title suggests, Some Bodies in the Grief Bed evolves around loss, but also those moments of ecstasy and joy that are attached to them. As Martín Prechtel suggests, such grief is also and always just another opportunity to praise everything and everyone we’ve been lucky enough to hold and have in this world without keeping. This book reminds us both to hold each moment and to be more mindful of what it’s made (out) of— the organic, impermanent nature of our “passing love” (Langston Hughes) on this planet.

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Written in pandemic, Rick Benjamin’s The Mob Within the Heart, is a poetic witnessing: of illness and loss, of harm to the more-than-human sentient world, of cultural, familial & political conflict, and of deep, enduring, lasting love—of people, & of the planet & everything on it. In this book, it is all happening at the same time: Covid and Black Lives Matter; praise of all sentient life, while also testifying to the damage already done; a fracture-defying interconnectedness among loved ones, and other “families” (biological, chosen, messed up & made). Benjamin’s work is a series of snapshots occurring at once, a commitment to train attention in as many different directions as possible in this particular moment. As Dickinson says in her own poem, it’s a crowded heart, but one with a beat no laws can touch, ultimately asking, simply, just the best of us, or, at the very least, so much more.

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