The Singing River

The Singing River, by Benjamin Morris

Traveling along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, The Singing River asks what can be saved in a place of shifting landscapes and ancient memory. Benjamin Morris’ debut collection meditates on the forces of nature that shape our notions of family and identity. Formally diverse and elegantly crafted, these poems bear witness to a region where the soil often finds blood and water mixed, tinged with hope that some of us may still emerge cleansed after going under.

A native of Mississippi, Benjamin Morris is the author of Coronary (Fitzgerald Letterpress, 2011), Hattiesburg, Mississippi: A History of the Hub City (Arcadia/History Press, 2014), and Ecotone (Antenna, 2017). He holds an MSc in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Edinburgh, and among other honors has received a Pushcart nomination, the Academy of American Poets Prize from Duke University, and the Chancellor’s Medal for Poetry from the University of Cambridge, where he earned his Ph.D. The recipient of academic and creative fellowships from the Mississippi Arts Commission and Tulane University, his writing appears regularly in the United States and Europe. He lives in New Orleans.

Praise for The Singing River

“When Benjamin Morris says of the low country of Mississippi and Louisiana, ‘were this landscape a lover / I would leave it without mercy,’ we hear the declaration of amour fou that binds so many of us to the South. These poems sing the beauty of this captivating, complicated place, a song lush and lyrical until it bursts forth in heat, flood, or other distempered act that may swallow us the way ‘the shadow of a barn / eats a black dog whole.’ This poet’s eye and ear are fine-tuned instruments of perception and attention, well suited to his favored form, the sonnet—the lover’s and elegiast’s default mode. He also creates an elegant, riverine form to embody the book’s remarkable title poem. Let us laud this marvelous debut.”

—Brad Richard, author of Turned Earth

“The landscapes we inhabit make claims upon us that are often overwhelming in their totality and complexity. And dissecting those claims (of history, of identity, of conflict) but more so, piecing it all back together, is a task uniquely suited for only the most insightful of poets. In The Singing River, Benjamin Morris masterfully plumbs the depths of our geo-psychic human capacities, enticing us to question who we are and what we might become. Each poem here reads like a bronze placard to be mulled over for years; each has its own mysterious life energy that’s impossible to resist.”

—Rodrigo Toscano, author of The Cut Point and The Charm & the Dread

“At every line’s end, Benjamin Morris’ The Singing River enacts a rare clarity of being. Morris’ lyric considers the ways our complex and often contradictory interior lives are nuanced responses to the overwhelming land(s) of the South where ‘trees uproot themselves / from the earth to crawl under each other / for shade.’ The poems that make The Singing River speak the material world of highways, backfiring trucks and our shared ecological life, but faithfully a kind metaphysical logic is being tested too—‘the map forgotten the map imagined the map dreamed.’ Morris reminds us that the realities we imagine we must also live through and within. Whether by starlight or lantern light The Singing River makes legible a South that even in the thicket of its opaqueness is beautiful.”

—C.T. Salazar, author of Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking

Details:

• Publication date: February 25, 2025
  
• Trim size: 6 x 9 in
• 978-1-960215-33-8
• 84 pages

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