floating world
by Rick Benjamin

Time, deep time, is living in the resonant poems of Rick Benjamin. It’s amazing how legacies of family and habitation may be so neatly shaped and contained in lilting stanzas. Benjamin has a clear tongue for saying and a fine hold on mystery. After reading his poems, the world feels both more floating and more firm.

naomi shihab nye

In Floating World, Rick Benjamin excavates layers of somatic memory to recall near-death encounters, recovering the unspeakable while making wonder out of the life-altering events that gave birth to the poet’s consciousness. A book that reveals what’s abandoned behind the shed door, forgotten in rooms full of dust, and inscribed in the scars of the body, this moving collection of poems reaches inward to revisit and hold up each small death to more closely regard the intimate roots of loss and the compassion that is born of giving everything up. Imbued with an ineffable longing, Rick Benjamin’s poems “turn over a new sense of home on our tongues.”

shin yu pai