Praise for Lin Nelson Benedek’s First Book

In her debut collection, I Was Going to Be a Cowgirl, Lin Nelson Benedek writes poems with the reckless joy of someone who knows she has been loved and is still being loved, such that memory becomes a tender place to reclaim pleasures forgotten or lost and to heal wounds. These are poems fecund with language reaching for the sensual and for a quality of honesty that is refreshingly vulnerable. Bees, cowgirls, rock and roll, motherhood, booze, juicy steaks, riotous women and the myths of American western history all come together in this woman’s leaping imaginings. This collection is a deep-throated flower of consuming pleasures out of which you will emerge stained with “the spices of a million flowers”!

Kwame Dawes, author of City of Bones: A Testament

I Was Going to Be a Cowgirl builds a world that’s hard to resist, alive and pulsing with music. I am moved by how fearlessly these poems confront the past, the imperfections of our relationships, and amid loss carves out a life. With an eye for even the smallest detail, the pollen on a bee’s leg, her vision expands, sweeping across oceans and mountain ranges, offering an entire world. These poems are essential not just because they lead us into the unknown, but because they return us to ourselves.

Dorianne Laux, Book of Men

The poems in Lin Nelson Benedek’s striking debut collection—abuzz with acute reckonings, dive bars, and bees—conjure the vital landscapes and figures of the past with her distinctive mix of vulnerability and grit. Benedek interweaves fraught family narratives with tender appraisals of a long marriage, often invoking a cast of self-reliant iconoclasts (Annie Oakley, a dynamite-loving grandfather) as well as the magnetic cultural vistas of West Coast bohemia. In one poem a speaker at a concert hears Leon Russell spin a beguiling shaggy-dog story from the stage. Elsewhere a great-grandmother from Nebraska, who teaches Shakespeare to local women, declares, “I don’t want to be remembered for my pies.” These disarming poems are by turns “outlaw beautiful,” gutsy, and unguarded, and to each one Benedek brings her radiant ear and bracing anecdotal eye.

Anna Journey, Vulgar Remedies

 Boozy on blossoms and coltish delight, the narrator is everygirl who desires to be cowgirl, road scholar, sword swallower, hollerer, and one day finds herself in concert with husband and son.  A wild and generous spirit informs these poems as they move from the opening epigraph by William Blake—My mother groaned! My father wept. Into the dangerous world I leapt—to a celebration of being—fully-fledged.

Sandra Alcosser, Except by Nature

Praise for Lin’s Second Book

Like the paintings on the walls of Chauvet in Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams or the enigmas of Wonderland that challenge Alice, the poems in Lin Nelson Benedek’s new collection dramatize the self’s relationship to the world through symbol. Wounded and reflective, intimate and anecdotal, Benedek’s book charts a narrative arc through the private world of the speaker: a quest to reconcile grief with the manifold quiet triumphs of an abiding life with a beloved husband and son. Even though the border between the worlds of sleeping and waking may be dark, Benedek reveals that it is also permeable and revelatory. —Anna Journey, The Atheist Wore Goat Silk

When a peacock—the symbol of spiritual awakening—speaks to you in a dream, listen up! In this remarkable new collection, Jungian imagery, impossible longing and Rousseau’s lush, jungle fantasies juxtapose sharply with harsh reality: the absent father, the out of her depth mom, their inevitable divorce. The death of Benedek’s beloved mother sends her into an orgy of despair. Interspersed with dream fragments that provide both mystery and deeper understanding, these poems mine the riches of Benedek’s tumultuous early years, taking the reader on an unforgettable journey through an examined life. —Alexis Rhone Fancher, author of Enter Here and Junkie Wife.

Benedek’s second poetry collection is attestation that vulnerability and the thorns of human drama can be translated into an authentic, magical and inspired language. When a Peacock Speaks to you in a Dream is amemorable selection of poems offered through the author’s anchoring and tender voice. Benedek carries the spirit and insights of Alice from Wonderland, Dorothy from Oz, Eve from The Garden, Williemarie from Nebraska, and here now, she offers us the wisdom of the speaking peacock. I think it’s good for all of us to listen.

—Sam Roxas-Chua, author of Saying Your Name Three Times Underwater and Echolalia in Script

For a beautiful moment we are possessed by “impermanence;/ freedom, longing,” all at once, in Lin Benedek’s lush new book. There’s a perfected contrast intersection between the hallucinatory topography of mythic dreams and that precise geography found in our everyday contemporary reality. These poems, these “blessings for the survivors” are what Benedek offers as songs to “extinguish flames.” Dear “Pleasure World”: whoever “dives deep to shipwreck” finds themselves face to face with a vast ocean treasure.

—Elena Karina Byrne, Squander

Although we may each have a desire to say this is who I am and this is what I came for, Lin Nelson Benedek has gone beyond that to harvest the raw material of her dreams and create from ether’s gift a seductive pattern, its frayed edges tamed by a gentle and generous lyric voice. —Sandra Alcosser, A Fish to Feed All Hunger and Except by Nature

Praise for LIn’s Third Book

Lin Benedek’s latest collection, Singing Lessons, has a “morning glory,” “French horn,” “say salvation” soundtrack playing throughout the poems which, above all, demonstrate that “women need to take up more space.” From Marvin Gaye to Papa Haydn to variations on variations, you won’t be able to keep yourself from humming along.

~Lynne Thompson, Los Angeles Poet Laureate

Lin Benedek crafts a poetic score both grand and intimate in her latest collection, Singing Lessons. I’m awed by her meticulous eye for detail, and what a testament to her powers of recall and observation that she’s able to weave an opulent tapestry of examined gesture, dialogue, and mise en scène with brief philosophical turns that ground her handiwork in a richly dark terrain. This is sumptuous repast for ear and imagination as Benedek pulls us in close to her contemplated world of things and sings us through.

~Michelle Bitting, Broken Kingdom

These poems blend all the senses, the nerves of the brain, the blood of the heart. I admire the variety of their forms, studded with the images of Southern California, from the  gritty to the gorgeous. Benedek’s impulse is to tell a story but she’s never that far from a song.

~Joseph Millar, Kingdom