Flowers on a Train traverses a natural world both real and imagined, where we hunger for something beyond the boundaries of loss. Rich in crisp, lush imagery and filled with family, food, art, and music, the poems take us to local and far away places. Walking the neighborhood before surgery, we encounter a talking tree, hiking in a Sierra storm, the skies appear as a white bird, and listening to a New York jazz combo, we time-travel to Paris in the 20s. In the end, Benjamin shows us that through memory, forgiveness, and reconciliation, we can navigate what's broken.
About the Author :
Laurel Benjamin is a San Francisco Bay Area poet, active with the Women's Poetry Salon. She is the curator of Ekphrastic Writers and is a reader for Common Ground Review. Journal publications include: Lily Poetry Review, Pirene's Fountain, Cider Press Review, Taos Journal of Poetry, Mom Egg Review, Ekphrastic Review, Nixes Mate, West Trestle Review, Of the Book Literary Magazine, Deronda Review, Gone Lawn, Minyan Magazine, Eunoia Review, Moon City Review, LIT Magazine, and Rise Up Review, where her work has been recognized. Her work has also been anthologized in Women in a Golden State (2025); The Nature of Our Times: Poems on America's Land, Waters, Wildlife, and Other Natural Wonders (2025); and Turning a Train of Thought Upside Down: An Anthology of Women's Poetry (2006). She received Honorable Mention for the Ruben Rose Memorial Poetry Competition, was a finalist for the Cider Press Review Book Award, and received Honorable Mention with Small Harbor Publishing. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Laurel holds an MFA from Mills College. She is a former temp worker, children's book buyer, and community college English instructor. She invented a secret language with her brother.
Review :
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 LivingUnforgettable. 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 ReviewThe 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)
