Review of Moon as Salted Lemon by Clayre Benzadón

 

-Lorena Garfi

 

To read Moon as Salted Lemon is to taste memory on your tongue—bruised, bright, fermented, and sacred. Clayre Benzadón doesn’t offer us a collection of poems—she offers us a body. A bilingual, blood-warm, salt-kissed body that has survived queerness, exile, eating disorders, prayer, and longing—and still dares to write itself into beauty.

 

Her work is sensual, surreal, and shatteringly honest. It touches every sense—chewy, sticky, fragrant, sonic—and still leaves you starving for more. The lemon in this book isn’t just a flavor. It’s a wound. It’s a spell. It’s a love letter and a warning. It is, above all, a symbol of what it means to live between sweetness and survival.

 

✦ Language as Reclamation

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Benzadón moves seamlessly between English and Spanish, not as translation—but as resurrection. Ladino, Spanglish, prayer-verse, and playground slang all coexist in the mouth of a speaker who was never supposed to speak.

 

“Ladino is our cryptogram, our first romance.”

She doesn’t just write poems—she decodes the silence forced onto her lineage. Her syntax becomes an uprising.

 

✦ The Body as Myth, Mess, and Memory

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There is no romanticizing here. In Sleight of Hand, The Fucked Up Part About Fucking You, and How to Complete a Meal, Benzadón shows the body not as a temple—but as battlefield, confession, and craving.

 

“Recovery: a fabrication. (I swear, I would have preferred drugs to food).”

This isn’t performative pain. This is truth, raw and ritualized.

 

✦ Queerness as Sacred Ache

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There’s a subtle, glowing queerness woven through every page—not just in the gender of desire, but in its form. In When a Dream Speaks to Me and La Fábul(os)a, she explores longing not as a single act, but as a way of living.

 

“She hands me a slice, asks me about want.”

These are not love poems. These are poems about what love costs.

 

✦ Inheritance and Exile

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This book is Sephardic. Spanish. Stateless. Jewish. Haunted.

And through that tangle, it becomes divine.

 

“We Jews, we didn’t get to choose. We just ended up stateless.”

From Stateless to Blood Libel, Benzadón traces the generational ache of being the wrong name in the wrong country, the wrong prayer in the wrong history book. She doesn’t just write about exile—she is exile, writing herself back into place.

 

And yet, even in her most devastating pieces, there is presence. A stubborn heartbeat. A girl still quivering at the top of a skate ramp, daring to jump. A woman licking the last of the lemon bar filling off her fingers, daring to feel.

Clayre Benzadón has written a collection that cannot be consumed quickly. You do not breeze through Moon as Salted Lemon—you chew it slowly, weep quietly, and rise differently.

 

This book is for the ones who know what it means to live between identities, languages, genders, hungers.

It’s for the ones who survived the dinner table, the synagogue, the psych ward, the bedroom, the prayer rug.

It’s for anyone who has ever whispered please love me through the act of writing.

It is bold. Brutal. Poetic. Revolutionary.

 

In her poem Ars Poetica, Clayre writes:

 

“I was already thinking about the future of holding the damn parts in place…”

 

That’s exactly what this book does.

It doesn’t put you back together.

It holds the damn parts in place—until you’re ready to love even the ones that cracked.

 

And that, to me, is poetry.

And that, to me, is holy.

And that, to me, is Clayre.

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​Lorena Garfi is an authenticity coach, poet, and creative guide who helps women reconnect with their true selves after years of living for others. Through the healing power of poetry, storytelling, and radical self-expression, she invites her clients to reclaim their voice, soften their shame, and come home to who they truly are. Her work is rooted in deep emotional truth, feminine alchemy, and spiritual courage. A former model turned mother, artist, and midlife awakener, Lorena now guides others through transitions, grief, and reinvention—one poem, one breath, one truth at a time.