Meyerson, Ben: Seguiriyas

Black Ocean, paperback

Publication Date: October 3, 2023

Publisher Marketing: A debut poetry collection that draws on the music and culture of flamenco to explore the diasporic experience.

In Seguiriyas, a title that is derived from the flamenco palo (or "song form"), Ben Meyerson picks paths through the reverberations of diaspora, displacement, and transit. Moving back and forth between his upbringing in an Ashkenazi Jewish family in Toronto and his time spent plumbing the history and cultural tensions that animate Andalusian culture, the collection explores how modes of subjectivity built on immersion and distance can distend sensory experience, reshape landscapes, and tug bodies, which grow longer and more tattered by the journey. As he moves within the disjunctive trace of diaspora and dispersion, Meyerson assembles an array of reference points that range from the history of the Roma in Spain, philosophies of material immanence, flamenco performance, medieval Iberian Hebrew and Arabic poetry, rock music and the echoes of Jewish ritual practice. Seguiriyas does not seek to neatly arrange the pluralities that it observes; rather, it moves in their wake, offering a form of careful attention.