The Mob within the Heart

<p>Written in pandemic Rick Benjamin's <em>The Mob Within the Heart</em> 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 <em>it's a crowded heart but one with a beat no laws can touch</em> ultimately asking simply just the best of us or at the very least so much more.</p><p><br></p>