Flowers on a Train

In this rich poetry collection, Laurel Benjamin weaves deft ekphrastic and figurative narratives with lyrics and gorgeously wrought verse memoir. This is a complex meditation on parents, illness, siblings and of moving through young adulthood and femininity. The book is full of lyric narrative connections, of desire to be free and of a deep conversation with art and allusion. Complex and deeply moving, these poems "cannot follow/ where the blue moss /sings a song of its own loss." Instead, they allow us to imagine the writer ever evolving, walking "through/the cypress garden with its airy pockets, opened."

Eileen Cleary, founding editor of Lily Poetry Review, author of Wild Pack of the Living

Unforgettable. What a dazzling collection. Laurel Benjamin has an uncanny way of getting inside you even though her words are about someone else. Her exquisite poetry stirs up memories and impressions as if you shared them. These are poems about difficult conversations and loneliness, of beauty and regret. The bridge between reader and writer is made of art and jazz and faded photographs, of beloved poets whose words inspire hers and ours. And of the tiny wildflowers everywhere that keep growing just like hope.

Lorette C. Luzajic, founding editor of The Ekphrastic Review

The poems in this standout collection read like "islands joined by an isthmus" where slivers of Americana appear in conversation with jazz, fine art, the fragility of the body's failings, and a deep engagement with the natural world, all the while transporting the reader "to the vanishing point where silk weaves together." As Benjamin confesses, "I've got nothing to lose," and in doing so, she offers the reader both reflections and revelations that sing so profoundly they "restructure our bones."

Megan Merchant, author of Hortensia, in winter (New American Press)