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