The Worrying Stone

Elegiac in tone, The Worrying Stone speaks to the vicissitudes of love and loss, of death and dying, and the wages of regret. Relationships fray. Individuals struggle at the edge of sanity. An old man waits to die, while another comes to terms with a youthful impulse to kill. Lives are often rent by violence and shaped by grief. In simple, plain-spoken language, these poems aim at the concreteness of objects, of circumstance, and illuminate the beauty in what Carson calls "the rough poetry of things."

Benjamin D. Carson's creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in many literary publications, including Rumble Fish Quarterly, Yellow Medicine Review, Waterwheel Review, South Dakota Review, and Crab Creek Review. His chapbook We Give Birth to Light: Poems was published by Finishing Line Press in June 2021.