Painted Women in the Walls by Jenny Benjamin

Girlhood, womanhood, motherhood. Sylvia Plath & Lizzie Siddel. Moses as a baby. Italy & London. The self as an exfoliating selkie.  Jenny Benjamin has me scratching my head: “How did she manage to arrange so much, so exquisitely, in such a small space?” This is a magical, living book that deepens with every careful reading. It invites us at the onset: “Sit down at my table. I’ll flip forever/ like a figure eight. I’ll let you look / at me for as long as it takes.”

–Mauricio Kilwein Guevara, author of Autobiography of So-and-so: Poems in Prose

Painted Women in the Walls is a compelling story of womanhood through fourteen narrative poems. Launched by Magician’s invitation/challenge/dare/caution to continue reading, an alchemy of explorations and emotions unfolds. Poems of unwavering force delve into identity through voices by and about women. Their complexity and contrasting of roles, relationships, and perspectives are pursued with luscious language, imagery, and simile throughout, but especially so in the poem “Clutched by a Nearly Noon Sun.” In each of its seven sections, a woman is reframed by the “other” in her life, offering a kaleidoscopic view of loves, longings, loneliness, and loses that cascade through sensory, sensuous phrasing that both pleases and taunts the ear. Taken individually these poems merit praise. As a totality, the work welcomes (and deserves) repeated reading, discussion, and study. As Magician says, “This is something/ you won’t forget.”

–Sandy Brehl, Novelist and Contributor to poetry anthologies for youth; What Is a Friend? What Is Family? and What Is Hope? (Pomelo Books)

Benjamin’s thin third volume packs a verbal wallop. There are two ways to read her— first for her narrative, beginning with a vague, medieval whiff of empresses and magicians and swiftly switching gears to the domesticated profundities of daily contemporary life, not without moments of epiphany, like brief, fatalistic fables. The other path is a scavenger hunt— seeking “string music hollow at the wrist” where the subject “wishes for bitter pith” in her “fantasy of praxis.” Rife with sharp interior rhymes and lush language, deftly attuned to powerful particulars, the reader will not hesitate to join the poet as she  urges us to “lead our sisters to the shores and step in/and take the water with us as we swim.” However the book is read, it rewards.

–Scott Zieher, author of Virga and 900 RECENT POEMS