My collection "Black Pastoral" seeks to hold both the brutality and the beauty that simultaneously characterize Black folks' relationship with the natural world. In using the epithalamion, a form written in celebration of a wedding, to depict the Middle Passage, during which many enslaved Africans leapt from captors' ships into the ocean below, I hoped to hold to the light a drop of such beauty awash in the brutal waters of our shared history. Ariana Benson on "Epithalamion in the Wake" |
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