Moon as Salted Lemon by Clayre Benzadón
Driftwood Press, 2025
Clayre Benzadón’s Moon as Salted Lemon is an exploration of the body and the self with all the sourness and tartness one could find in a Meyer lemon. The poetry collection is divided into three sections, each exploring identity and anxiety through all the clashes that occur around its speaker. By looking deep into the rind of human flesh, Benzadón presents a collection that both stings and sticks in the mind long after reading.
Throughout the collection, Benzadón looks at self-discovery and self-reflection through the act of peeling. Much like peeling a lemon for a custard, many of the poems involve the peeling of flesh and the rumination of the bones beneath to understand oneself. In “Panic Attack,” she writes, “…it is an addiction / to be a woman / who strips off / her body, / peels it / off in / an attempt / to detach from / the past of / skin.”
But it’s not just flesh that Benzadón is flaying throughout the collection. The poems in Moon as Salted Lemon are primarily written in free verse, but her choice of line breaks alters the reading of words and their meaning. Some line breaks occur in the middle of a word, forcing the reader to pause and reread to better understand the poet’s intent, such as when she writes “Let me go back / to origin- / ality” in “Category Theory.” Others have her using stanza breaks to add to the tension, such as in “Hungering over / Solidifying into Succade” when a stanza break plays with the intent of the word “hid” in these two stanzas:
I was looking for that,
for another space. I hidmy simmer while my mother
heightened stove heat…
Language itself is also another layer for Benzadón’s exploration and deconstruction. Owing to her Spanish and Jewish heritage, Benzadón writes numerous poems and verses in untranslated Spanish or Hebrew. Whether or not the reader can understand these languages, these can often enhance the poems in the collection, as its in only these languages that some ideas can be expressed, especially when they call upon things mentioned by relatives, such as in “No Me Importa un Pimiento” when a relative asks the narrator if she’s going to get married.
Moon as Salted Lemon is a fantastic exploration of the complex clashes that occur in nurturing the body and the mind. While there is a lot of sourness to explore, it’s enhanced by moments of sweetness and care. Benzadón’s journey has produced a lot of effective and memorable poems.
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Alex Carrigan (he/him) is a Pushcart-nominated editor, poet, and critic from Alexandria, VA. He is the author of Now Let’s Get Brunch (Querencia Press, 2023) and May All Our Pain Be Champagne (Alien Buddha Press, 2022).