The Singing River

Published by Belle Point Press in February 2025, The Singing River is inspired by the Southern landscape, and appear in a variety of European and American venues, including The Southern Review, The Dark Mountain Journal, Horizon Review, The Independent on Sunday, The Island Review, Stirring, The Peauxdunque Review, Susurrus, and The May Anthologies. Prior to its acceptance by Belle Point, the collection was, among other placements, a 2019 finalist for the Faulkner-Wisdom Writing Competition in poetry, a 2020 finalist for the Raz-Shumaker Prize for Poetry from Prairie Schooner, and a finalist for the 2023 Washington Prize from the Word Works.

“At every line’s end, Benjamin Morris’ The Singing River enacts a rare clarity of being. … 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

“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 … Let us laud this marvelous debut.” —Brad Richard, author of Turned Earth

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