Laurel Benjamin
Reviews & Interviews
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REVIEW OF FLOWERS ON A TRAIN: Sandra Fees Reads Laurel's Debut Collection
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READ ONLINE at Heavy Feather Review
In her debut poetry collection, Flowers on a Train, Laurel Benjamin reminds us of what’s possible if we are willing to revisit broken relationships and allow something else to blossom in their place. As the collection’s title suggests, nature permeates these pages. While we might be tempted to assume these will be nature poems, they are, in actuality, landscapes of the self in the world. That world, for Benjamin, revolves primarily around the San Francisco Bay Area but also extends to New Jersey, Hawaii, and elsewhere. It’s a place brimming with family stories and everyday moments.
Benjamin is an astute observer whose quest for reconciliation leads her to reexamine relationships and self. Her parents’ deaths set in motion the central questions of the collection, and the poems are unwavering in their search for glimmers of meaning and hope. The result is a rich mosaic of insights into forgiveness, human frailty, and connection.
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Benjamin begins her exploration by looking at childhood. The poem, “Visionary,” for example, considers parental constraints. In the poem, the speaker and her brother sneak outside to stargaze in order “to avoid [their] parent’s radar”—the father’s scrutiny and the mother’s expectations. The speaker asks:
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What did we fear—
father’s analysis, the Rorschach blots,
mother’s card catalog schedule
and neatly buttoned shirtwaist dresses
slipping us into slots?
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These precise portrayals capture the childhood predicament. The “slots” prove difficult to escape and to do so requires courage and the vision alluded to in the poem’s title.
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The poem, “While She Blotted Her Lipstick,” presents a different perspective. Here, Benjamin explores regret. The speaker, a daughter, longs for emotional and physical closeness to her mother. Surprising imagery and evocative word choices create a telling maternal portrait. In the poem, the mother delivers the “lunge of a scorpion” rather than praise. The speaker says, “I wish she had ceased-fire the missiles she couldn’t resist / so I could rest my hand in hers before the stroke, not after.” The tenderness of hands takes the place of the destructive missiles but can’t undo the damage. Intimacy comes too late.
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In the book’s penultimate poem, “Inside Bird,” a daughter searches for acceptance. This poem is among the collection’s most lyrical. The title introduces the central image: a blown glass bird ornament. The ornament belongs to her mother and gets broken by the cat. The rare glass bird, however, represents the daughter, who says:
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[My mother] built a home of vases and glass,
shelves to see through to outside birds
but did she hear the inside cooing bird,
did she imagine the glass bird could fly?
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The cooing of the inside bird evokes the feeling of lament. The final couplet, introduced by the word “but,” makes an important turn to two unsettling questions, both unanswerable. Did her mother hear the cooing but ignore it? Did she appreciate her daughter as a person in her own right?
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The collection wisely and elegantly concludes with the titular poem, “Flowers on a Train,” which is among my favorites. Here, Benjamin shifts our attention to two strangers, two women who are riding a train. The poem’s speaker, one of the women, observes the other woman crying while “flowers fall off [the woman’s] shirt.” Empathy arises as the speaker recalls that she, too, has cried. Benjamin concludes this poem and her collection with these visually astute lines:
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Do you see me
a few seats away—
your flowers crawl
up my legs thick velvet pile silent wet.
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The lines are constructed as a question but one devoid of a question mark. They become an appeal: “see me.” This appeal is addressed to the other woman although I can’t help but wonder if the speaker isn’t ultimately addressing herself. It is no accident that the words of this poem fall down the page like flowers. The flowers symbolize the reconciliation the speaker has been seeking all along. The poem assures us that human connection can happen anywhere, even on a train, and with anyone, even a stranger.
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Flowers on a Train is a masterful collection of gorgeous poems that transports us through a landscape unique to Benjamin’s experience and poetic vision. Each encounter with the self and the world reveals one more possibility for how to navigate the boundaries of loss. Benjamin invites us along on this journey. She offers no certainty about how the journey will turn out. But there is wisdom and hope. The collection reminds us that beauty and repair can happen if we embrace our hunger and see our lives and ourselves anew.
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INTERVIEW WITH THE EKPHRASTIC REVIEW: Flowers on a Train - October 2025
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The Ekphrastic Review: Tell us about Flowers on a Train. How did this collection come together?
Laurel Benjamin: Most of the poems came together in the last five years. There is a biographical arc here, with pieces about family, memory, and identity, though the poems are not arranged chronologically. I could see a better path guided by theme, then moving a few pieces around so the sections didn't feel so neat. I couldn't have done this project without brilliant poet-friends like Sandra Fees and a critique from mentor Eileen Cleary, with whom I'd taken workshops. The author and artist Megan Merchant is a guide, as her revision workshop posited the idea of wisdom in the poem and how to connect figurative language. The work of readers and mentors not only made a difference within that set of poems and that manuscript, but also influenced craft going forward.
​The Ekphrastic Review: Many of the poems in this collection are ekphrastic. Tell us something about your ekphrastic journey. Has art always been important to you? In what ways does art inspire you as a poet?
Laurel Benjamin: My mother led me through San Francisco Bay Area museums and galleries. I grew up taking ballet, playing piano, then oboe, making art patterned or graphic, more than imagistic or landscaped, and considered art school. A relationship with the arts and conversations about the arts played a large role in my development as a person. Yet that relationship with art changed in 2021 when I took my first online workshop with Canadian artist and writer Lorette C. Luzajic, who runs The Ekphrastic Review. In these sessions, people wrote to classical, ancient, and modern art and shared their results. I decided to start an ekphrastic writers group that fall, dedicated to community as much as writing. That group has been going ever since, where I post prompts every week and writers respond then provide supportive suggestions. This is where I develop most of my writing these days. What ekphrastic writing offers is a chance to have an unexpected experience, find a setting or idea outside of one's self or to find a mirror the self, to find an escape into the art, or speak from the point of view of the art or something in the art. Ekphrastic prompts also offer the gift of imagery. Ekphrastic writing has become like food, necessary for survival.
​The Ekphrastic Review: How has your relationship to visual art changed through ekphrasis?
Laurel Benjamin: I devour art now, and much of it not the kind my mother liked, or myself of past times, specifically abstract painting. Recently at the San Francisco MOMA I walked through the Joan Mitchell show, abstracts covering entire walls. I came away with a couple favourites. The through-line of the story here is the willingness to grapple with abstracts in my own way rather than feeling left out. In one of Lorette's workshops, where we studied a collage that had so much going on, she instructed us to just take a section of the painting and focus on that exclusively instead of being overwhelmed. That approach has released expectations provided a key into the secret garden of images.
​The Ekphrastic Review: What is your ekphrastic process like? How do you choose artworks to write about, or do they choose you?
Laurel Benjamin: I go down rabbit holes searching online for art. I try to buck my personal taste to a certain extent, but listen to it at the same time. Sometimes an art exhibition will present something unexpected. For instance, Mary Cassatt at Work, shown at the San Francisco Legion of Honor in 2024, dedicated one room to her pastels. A different technique than oils, yet the resulting details felt similar. Other techniques of hers were groundbreaking. Then online, I look for upcoming artists with various backgrounds in a variety of countries, who are promoted not only in art magazines, but also on museum and exhibition sites. I find depth in a combination of painting, photography, sculpture, and installations.
​The Ekphrastic Review: You have several poems after Leonora Carrington and also Johannes Vermeer in this book. What draws you to these artists? Are there other painters that you return to over and over?
Laurel Benjamin: Carrington and Vermeer are among the few I give credit to in the book, but most poems in the collection are ekphrastic. The aim is for the work to be stand-alone, meaning not reliant on the art. As for Carrington's surrealist paintings, my poem "The Bird Men," after The Bird Men of Burnley (1970), uses a magical realism response, where men in the painting threaten the birds and the speaker. They represent all the ills of society. Her images gift a kind of freedom in writing, and allow disparate images to arise; whether they coalesce in the poem is the challenge.
Some works in the famous Vermeer exhibition (Rjiksmuseum, Amsterdam, 2023), had never been shown to the public, 28 of 37 total works. A film of the exhibition at my local theatre included an art expert's narration. Vermeer's piece, The Art of Painting (Allegorie op de Schilderkunst) (1666-68), is typical of the artist, depicting a woman inside a canal house, and in this case an artist's model. Yet we're not sure if she is a professional model, a worker, or his daughter. In my poem, "Lower Your Eyes," I bring in doubt, try to capture the time and place from the point of view of a young woman with few options.
​The Ekphrastic Review: Not all of the poems in the collection are ekphrastic, although I would say they carry the spirit of art with them in the imagery and sensibility and references to other kinds of art such as music and literature. How do you decide which poems will be ekphrastic? Where else do you derive inspiration from?
Laurel Benjamin: Once an ekphrastic writer, always one. Poems that don't directly arise from images provide their own. Food, women's bodies, heritage, nature, music, are themes that dominate my work. Inspiration comes from a grocery store trip where bits of conversation are interspersed with the memory of my mother and I at Woolworth's eating liver and onions, or a tremor (I live in earthquake country, between two faults). A yearly trip to the Monterey Bay elicits a scene where along the shore a dead seal is having it's insides ripped out by the "knitting needle beaks of vultures." When my new neighbours cut down the two backyard trees at their move in party, I think of the Japanese who dominated this area, and who were rounded up and taken to internment camps. My morning walk presents a whole tree of bluebirds, where I "wait for the wavering kew in succession." Visiting cousins back east, in retrospect, I consider the bagel woman and everything she lost leaving the old country, where my Jewish family escaped. I started to think about the work of women, and the work I did when very young, like "shit jobs like ABC legal and the flower shop," taking an hour by streetcar to arrive at minimum wage A&W, as well as a law firm file room where "photos learned to drag themselves from their sleeves," showing horrific photos of women who'd sued for IUD malfunction. I attend classical music concerts regularly, and in one poem I complain directly to Beethoven. I'm also an early jazz fan, and in another poem I'm listening to Woody Allen at a New York jazz club, when my mind leaves the scene for 1920s Paris.
​The Ekphrastic Review: Was there a poem you found especially challenging to write? If so, why?
Laurel Benjamin: "Gingko" was a response to a Pep Ventosa piece (New York, Three, 2019.) He snaps hundreds of photos from different angles around a subject, merges them, capturing more than one moment in time. I wrote about a memory of high school chemistry, yet the poem ended up completely different. The subject was a specific tree on my neighbourhood walk, yet I didn't know why that "meeting" had such significance. Eileen Cleary asked "What's the poem about?" Spelling it out in plain language to her gave me a way in, desperation of having a mass removed from the abdomen. I threw out the first third of the poem. The leaves of the tree shimmer side by side, saying "You will heal."
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The Ekphrastic Review: What’s next for Laurel Benjamin? What are you working on right now?
Laurel Benjamin: My next collection, Written Into the Curve of the Sea's Open Throat, will be published in 2026 by Shanti Arts. In Flowers on a Train, we journey to different places and times, while Curve stays with themes of women, Jewish women, Jewish heritage, reproductive issues. The concept of compromise connects up the themes. A different twist, yet ekphrastic images again propel much of the work. I am currently working on a third collection focused on California. I've lived here my whole life, recently started writing poems about the rugged coast, mountains, trails, along with the San Francisco Bay and life around it, the foghorns and trains. So it's very atmospheric.
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INTERVIEW WITH FLAPPER PRESS POETRY CAFE: The Secret Language of Laurel Benjamin
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The Flapper Press Poetry Café features the work of poets from around the world. This week, we highlight the work of Laurel Benjamin. - June 2022
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If the ornament was a bird, breakable, then my mother was too, though during her life she presented herself as anything but fragile. As much as the poem is a loose ghazal, it is also an elegy, a lamentation for the glass bird ornament broken by my cat, the moment of it shattering, a reminder of the loss of my mother who gave me the ornament. The piece and the emotion carried describe not just a moment but a reverberation, as “bird” keeps happening, over and over again.
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AN: Laurel, welcome to Flapper Press Poetry Café. We love that you invented a secret language with your brother in your childhood. Were you also writing poems then? Can you share how creativity in childhood overflows into adulthood? And, I must ask, is your brother a poet too?
LB: My brother and I had a secret language. In fact, our aunt, Marilyn Sachs, who wrote children’s books, used this in one of her young-adult books. Some of our communication was non-verbal, where just a look would tear each other up in laughter. Some of the words were made up, like for our cat Orlando, who had many nicknames, such as Wangie, Willie Horton. Our father was called Ogi, Bloge, Perry-the-Puddlepatch-painter (a song was made up of this title), Fool-Around-Bloge. Our mother was called Wilers, Boars. We had names for various articles of clothing, kept a “quote book” of phrases our father said, usually at night while we were irritating him. When my brother and I grew up, our parents adapted and started using some of the language themselves, in a kind of fun familiarity. My brother and I made up songs with characters as well as referencing people we knew. When camping, my brother would immediately, when we arrived at a campground, find a couple of sticks from the ground and start drumming, and we would start singing. As an adult, my brother is an accomplished musician who teaches popular music on the guitar.
I always wrote fictionalized stories. I started writing love poems when I started college at 18. I was reading strictly English Romantic poetry; and not until one of my teachers recommended contemporary poetry did I stop spelling words in the British way. I got my MFA in fiction at Mills College. I believe writing in multiple genres informs each of them. I employ that both as a writer and also as an English teacher.
My mother did not grow up playing music or having creative outlets, but she loved the opera (her parents loved the Jewish theater). Mom was talented in languages, and when married made sure they both got working visas and lived in England and traveled the continent, saw opera in the great houses, ballet, symphony, theater, etc. Her thirst for high culture extended to involving me as a child in attending performances and going to museums. I studied music, art, dance. I played classical music with the piano first and then carried the oboe to high level.
AN: We live in a Renaissance of Poetic Creativity. How do you describe your poetry as compared with narrative and lyrical poets?
LB: Traditionally, I have written in the narrative style, and more recently have found my way into the lyric. I also depend on structure, not only in forms, but also in the line. I’ve learned as much from workshops in form as I have from those in free verse. I like to use all the tools, in other words. Sometimes I put a free-verse poem into a form, such as a sonnet or ghazal, and then bring it out again into free verse, taking some internal rhyme, depending on new lineation, or repetition—whatever the form has to offer.
AN: I noticed your poem “Inside Bird” engages two strong elements available in a poet’s toolbox, alliteration and repetition (of the word "bird"). Please share with our readers how these poetic devices help create sound in your poem. Is this intentional?
LB: “Inside Bird” is a loose ghazal, currently my favorite form; loose as in each couplet is not whole unto itself, and I use enjambment between lines and between stanzas. The forced end line repetition inherent in the ghazal causes surprising word pairings. It also pushes new discoveries while writing—the light bulb going off with a huge “ah”—and in this case, what I may not have realized about my mother.
AN: How do the Bay Area Women’s Poetry Salon and the Port Townsend Writers group best support your writing endeavors? Are these community writing groups open to area poets?
LB: The BAWPS has an anthology run by local poet Andrena Zawinski—she and I worked together in the English Dept. at Laney College in Oakland, and she is a mentor and a friend. The group has been meeting since 2006, the same time I started teaching at Laney. We meet every six weeks; pre-pandemic meetings took place at a different member’s house with a potluck included, and more recently we’ve met online. Members consist of top-notch writers of the Bay Area. Members have been vetted by the leader.
The Port Townsend Writers is a weekly freewrite group in the vein that I was leading in person for a few years early mornings at the Port Townsend Writers Conference in Washington State. It’s a private (not open) group. Members on the West Coast have attended the conference in person.
I run asynchronous writing groups; for example, one of many is the Ekphrastic Writers, which has run since summer 2021, a private Facebook group where I provide prompts and members post drafts and receive feedback from other members. It is not a publishing-oriented group, but many of us have had successes and gotten published from work generated in the group.
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