Written into the Curve of the Sea's Open Throat

poems by Laurel Benjamin

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The poems of Written into the Curve of the Sea’s Open Throat carry readers into Jewish heritage and forward into diaspora. In addition, the push against biological imperative as a woman causes us to consider ways in which all women disappear. This collection ranges from stories of donkeys and goats, to the ghost of a grandmother in the guise of a deer, to the broken glass inside a camera. The poems are filled with magical thinking brought on by necessity, and ultimately ask the question: How do we live a life while others—our family, our people—are suffering? In the end, it is mishpatim, learning to compromise in an argument that serves as a way to reconstruct guilt and mistakes, re-see the unseen, and survive—even if that survival is a journey into the speaker’s imagination, into the sea’s open throat.

POETRY / General

ISBN: 978-1-971191-12-6 (print; softcover; perfect bound)

Released April 21, 2026 | Copyright 2026

118 pages

Author Biography

A San Francisco Bay Area native, born and raised, Laurel Benjamin’s writing is sculpted by the coastal landscape, foghorns, and trains, but also by the stories of her ancestors. Her work has been recognized widely. Her book, Flowers on a Train (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2025), was finalist for the Cider Press Book Award and Honorable Mention for the Small Harbor Publishing Laureate Prize. She is a finalist for The Ekphrastic Review contests, has received Honorable Mention for the Ruben Rose Memorial Poetry Competition, Honorable Mention from OPA (Oregon Poetry Association), and holds Pushcart Prize and Best-of-the-Net nominations. She has been interviewed by The Ekphrastic Review and Flapper Press. Her poems appear in Pirene’s Fountain, Lily Poetry Review, Taos Journal of Poetry, Mom Egg Review, and elsewhere. Her work has also been anthologized in Women in a Golden State (Gunpowder Press, 2025), The Nature of Our Times (Paloma Press, 2025), among others. Laurel is active with the Bay Area Women’s Poetry Salon and is a reader for Common Ground Review. She founded and leads Ekphrastic Writers, a group dedicated to writing and community. Laurel holds an MFA in Fiction 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. Learn more at laurelbenjamin.com

Endorsements

“Laurel Benjamin’s second poetry collection, Written into the Curve of the Sea’s Open Throat, offers up abundance in its search for a tikkun olam, a healing of the world. With Benjamin as medium, translator of ghosts and languages, storyteller, historian, singer, and illuminator, the poems transmute experiences of pain and loss into a richness of detail and passion. Benjamin’s great-grandfather gives us the title of the collection, the necessary compromise involved in immigrating from Poland, but Benjamin adds to this a fullness in traveling from one thing to another, as we also travel into the making of art in so many forms—photography, painting, crocheting, felting, cooking. Each time, the vividness of Benjamin’s observation enables us to inhabit, to feel, to make sense of complexity. And on top of everything else, there are the goats. This book is a wonderful read.”
—Janet Bowdan, editor of Common Ground Review, author of Making Progress

“Laurel Benjamin hasn’t stopped inventing language since childhood, when she and her brother communicated with each other in a language of their own devising. Written into the Curve of the Sea’s Open Throat finds creative ways to talk about family history and Jewish identity as Benjamin experiments with punctuation and form. Deliberate, and often as delicate as the crochet to which she compares them, these poems convey both meaning and deep feeling. Yet they leave space for readers to bring their own associations and resonances, like the pieces of visual art that inspired many of them. Smart, beautiful work.”
—Susan Cohen, author of Democracy of Fire

“Oh, with that starling, the subtle weight of hineni (הנני) we begin these poems, invited to walk side by side, observe every detail, because we ‘could all use some advice on enlightenment.’ Laurel Benjamin’s evocatively titled, Written into the Curve of the Sea’s Open Throat, carries us on the tides to investigate and feel present with the echo of the imperative, ‘you will be mortal.’ Read slowly, selectively, and stay in the poems for a while, feel the textures and music of constant seeking, where we also find enlightenment, ‘rash with coercive thoughts,’ a tingle all the time, around the edges of haphazard life, a heart-breaking round up of life’s celebrations, losses, but most of the time, witness to the constant motion, constant awareness, fully present and attentive, ‘tucked behind our ears.’”
—Michelle Holland, author of Circe at the Laundromat

“Written into the Curve of the Sea’s Open Throat shows the power of the ekphrastic process, in a deeply personal story of a woman coming to terms with the body, a long-term marriage, family, and personal loss, as well as the intersections of family with her Jewish heritage, and the loses inherent in that diasporic experience. In ‘The Sacrificial Goat,’ the narrator says, ‘I’ve come to ask the goats about impermanence,’ an approach that is simultaneously direct and metaphorical, which captures the subtle power of this lovely book.”
—Carol Dorf, author of The Theory Headed Dragon

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