poet
Liminal Zenith
Liminal Zenith explores the boundless spaces running through the surreal, mythological, and natural environments, the complex dimensions of desire, and through the speaker’s love and grasp on her relationship with family. This chapbook is broken into different sections which navigate between temporal positionalities ranging from both from the lunar / lunatic forces to more transcendental liminal, “a continuum at the edge / of fragmented still / between / luminal and millennial”.
Liminal Zenith is a compact yet intricate collection that plays with language, the different iterations of the sensual, and a dream-heavy setting which “secret[ly] skirt[s] above conscious / ness […]” like “a single hymn ripped / out of the clouds”.
Clayre Benzadón’s Moon as Salted Lemon is a queering of form and language which interrogates the intersections of Sephardic Jewish, American, and nonbinary identity.
“This stunning debut collection is a multilingual poetic manifesto that advocates for a fierce scrutiny of the institutions that raise us. These poems remind me that authentic belonging to family, faith, and self is difficult and vital work. Benzadón cracks open words to find new meanings with linguistic agility and a reserve of compassion that leaves me in awe. These poems answer poetry’s highest call—to make and remake language—and as readers we are nourished and revitalized by her dedication”
— Mia Leonin,
author of Unraveling the Bed
“In these vulnerable, seeking poems, Clayre Benzadon queers and queries language, the body, desire, and identity to map and rewild the self and the selves Jewish, Spanish, Floridian, Queer, Daughter, Lover—that converge in this singular speaker. Here, intellect and wordplay are the tools that enable these poems to twine, slippery and playful, toward a more complex, embodied truth. For this reader, Moon as Salted Lemon is an opportunity to reconnect with language’s subversive powers.”
— Elizabeth Bradfield,
author of SOFAR and Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry
“Clayre Benzadón’s debut poetry collection delivers a time-warping, globetrotting, multilingual adventure in queer, Hispanic, and Jewish American experience. Fearless in its confessions, daring in its formal innovations, and true to its title, Moon as Salted Lemon contemplates, both, the tart and the luminous portions of the self. In this, Benzadón’s poems are richly nostalgic, introspective, and sensual, but perhaps most impressive of all, they are as keenly relatable as they are original.”
— Jaswinder Bolina,
author of English as a Second Language and Other Poems