Glaring is a beautiful and powerful, brilliant collection, combining energies of various modernisms with elegant maneuverings through the bleak media of contemporary America. Concerned with institutions- race, health, school, sports, police, family, money, history- as well as the shifting fortunes of affection and the self, these poems utterly transform two other well-worn institutions: the lyric and the page. -Lucy Ives (2019 Open Reading Period Guest Judge) 

Glaring hurdles its reader deep into formal consideration’s command center, framing every punctum with queries of relation and autonomy. This text is a world where a title may hold as much as its referent, where the next work might begin inside its predecessor, where theater is stripped down to its circuitry and the charge within the performance of all language is laid bare...The work is ripe with fracturing’s urgency to show the ways of new wholeness, and blackness shines everywhere like slivers of light. -Adjua Gargi Nzinga GreavesI find myself with a thinker who arrives “where het love is a freaky war machine.” I hate the moment things begin to feel only intellectual, he writes. Does he love, then, being with the “shock”and “energy” of perceiving emotion as an aggregate and multidimensional thing, now partly digital? I don’t know. The power of Ben’s work is so undeniable, it’s confusing to think about its singularity, which is a hint that it is from the future.