The Mob within the Heart

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 inter-connectedness 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.