little infinite Author Series Interview Questions – Clayre Benzadón
About Clayre Benzadón
Q: When did you know poetry would be the writing outlet for you? Introduce us to Clayre Benzadón’s journey to poetry and how you got to where you are currently.
I think art has always been a part of my DNA / soul. Before I started writing, I was quite serious about drawing (mostly cartoons). The class where I felt most like myself in a private school where I was bullied was in my art class. When I was younger, I was also a night owl and would hide under my covers creating all sorts of art projects.
I’ll never forget one of the first times I began the work of creative writing: in my English class, we had to take on the persona of an inanimate object. I chose to embody the life of a nail polish bottle. The actual details of the story are blurry, but the fact that I can still remember this project to this day means it impacted me in a strong way.
Flash forward to many years later….
I’m in high school and I have to take an elective. I think it was my senior year of high school. The teacher had an inferiority complex and felt the need to pick on students, for being “stupid” if they answered a question he had asked the class incorrectly. We were assigned work every day. At this point, I’d developed a hate for poetry.
Flash forward again –
I got accepted into college and did my first semester abroad as a midyear student. During this time, I had to choose which classes I would be taking at Brandeis. Out of curiosity, I looked for creative writing classes. The poetry class required students to send a sample of their work. I submitted a packet, just to see if I would get in.
I did. The first class in the workshop was so different from high school. It was a small, intimate class. The workshop ran for two and a half hours long but was only once a week. And most importantly, the professor I had (Elizabeth Bradfield) changed my life, in the best way possible—she taught me so much, not just on the page, but beyond it. I would say I most likely took a class with her almost every semester. And then I got to work with her on an honors poetry project, where we worked on a collection of work together, one-on-one. That honors project transformed into my first published work, my chapbook titled Liminal Zenith.
In my senior year of college, one of my professors encouraged me to apply to MFA programs. I got accepted to Naropa but couldn’t afford it. The next year, I applied to the University of Miami’s MFA program. I got in. This program also transformed my life: it brought me close to community, helped me find my mentors, and guided me to finding my dearest friends.
I believe in the power of healing and poetry. My dream is to become an expressive arts / writing therapist one day.
Q: If you could describe this collection (or your writing style) in three words, what would those words be and why?
If I could describe Moon as Salted Lemon, the three words I would choose would be 1) zesty 2) sexy and 3) intellectual.
I’d say “zesty” because that’s the overall arching theme throughout the book, the symbol of the lemon. The double meaning of this word, “zesty” can also mean lively, fun, and exciting. I also looked up the term on Urban Dictionary and it has a queer undertone to it—this speaks to my collection even more than it already had.
I would say “sexy” because my poems reflect the sensual and embodied language of desire, intimacy, and the complicated relationships between pleasure and pain.
Lastly, I’d say intellectual because this feature speaks to the elements of craft that I formally play with, such as doing research to write my documentary poetic poems, or learning how to solve a function to be able to write a math poem.
Q: What is next on your creative bucket list? Where do you hope to see your poetry and influence going in the community?
Right now, I would say I’m in between projects. I’m currently sending out a second poetry collection into the world (though not as religiously as I had been with my first collection, because I know it’s not done yet; however, I want to see where it lands with editors and readers). I also get the bug to write creative nonfiction occasionally, but I’m a poet; I thrive in concision—after I write a few hundred words or so, I tend to get stuck and not know where to go from there.
Lastly, my weekend creative practice keeps me going. I want to thank Trivarna Hariharan’s weekly virtual writing workshops and community, for keeping me accountable, vulnerable, and poetically prolific.
I hope that my poetry can reach people in times of need, or speak to them, or make them feel less alone. It would be really cool to be featured in any sort of lemon anthology, or an experimental poetry cookbook.
About Her Book:
Q: Your book Moon as Salted Lemon launched on 9/30/25. Congratulations! What can we expect from Moon as Salted Lemon?
Thank you so much! Without spoiling too much, I would say that you can expect lots of lemons to be lighting up the collection, in many different contexts: they’re featured in recipes, in music, and family tradition. You can also prepare yourself for some sensual, salt-rimmed moments, poems that tingle on the tongue, balancing sweetness with “sting”, where salt sharpens desire and grief alike. Lastly, sprinkled throughout this work is the art of multilingualism: whether that’s between Spanish, English, and / or Hebrew, or the language of math / invented terminology.
Moon as Salted Lemon is ultimately about savoring the world, even when it bites back, and resurrecting rebirth in what is both bitter and bright.
Q: What part of this collection of poetry did you find was the most challenging to write?
I think the most challenging poems to write were the long ones about family and mental illness. First off, on a more technical level, balancing between narrative and poetic is difficult, and I worry that I went too deep into the weeds with some of the descriptions and offhand remarks. In general, writing about family is also an extremely vulnerable and fragile process whereby I feared I didn’t fully portray a member in the way that seems fair or dimensional enough (I have to remind myself [and others] that a poem is a piece of art; the essence of it is the truth, but our memories and ways we portray things are distorted).
The long poem about my eating disorder is one I wrote while I was in an outpatient program; it took some time to fully shape. I had to step away from it for bits at a time, which is not what I usually do: once I start, I’m on a roll, and am determined to finish or “solve” the puzzle.
Q: Your title Moon as Salted Lemon is both surreal and sensory. How did that image first appear to you, and how does it set the tone for the collection?
My title was born from what I call a miracle poem—one that arrived in a single sitting, almost fully formed. The title, like the poem itself, came to me through a kind of alchemy between memory and intuition. The collection was largely inspired by my ex, whose presence lingers in the teal undertones of the book—the same color they once dyed my hair, the same shade that hums through the nightscape where the speaker drifts alone into a bar.
The song “Limón y Sal”, which they introduced me to, also infuses the work with its bittersweet melody. The lemon serves as a symbolic representation that I choose to closely connect to religion but which also serves as an image to set the stage for a budding feminist anthology.
Q: Several of your poems move between English and Spanish. How does language with its movement, translation, and gaps inform your sense of poetic truth?
I love this question, especially how you acknowledge the idea of “gaps” within language. I grew up listening to both English and Spanish. English is my mother tongue; I can understand Spanish fluently, but when it comes to speaking it, I’m not as versed / feel too embarrassed to converse in this language. However, I find that I write well in Spanish because I have more time to think about what I mean to express. Part of my mini project / intention with the Spanish language was to purposely mistranslate certain Spanish phrases (specifically from Spain), because they are untranslatable in English.
Take the phrase / my poem, “Ser La Leche”, for example. That literally translates to “To be the milk”. It’s hilarious, so I had to see what I could do with that kind of play. On a more serious note, I included another language, Ladino, into one of my poems to both highlight the fact that it is a dying language while also subverting that concept / including Ladino to honor it.
Clayre Benzadón’s Writing Process:
Q: What was your favorite and least favorite part of putting this collection together?
I think that my favorite part of putting this collection together was getting to take risks and working on poetic projects I hadn’t done before, such as experimenting with a math and recipe poem. The undertaking that I’m most proud of and that has probably the most amount of meaning to me is the documentary poetic work, of writing about my Sephardic Jewish family from Morocco / Spain. I got the chance to reach out to my uncle, who wrote a book, one which I used as a source. There also surprisingly wasn’t that much research done on this particular population, so I really had to do some digging. The balance between research and imagination / the poetic was also a fun challenge.
My least favorite part of putting this collection would definitely have to be the organization part of the process. I don’t think in organization; I have a more chaotic method to my madness. I couldn’t tell you how many times I played around with the ordering and section breaks; the more technical aspects of rearranging the book were more tedious, painstaking, and not as creative.
Q: What books/authors inspire you?
Honestly, this is such a difficult question because there are too many to name. But authors that come to mind include Lydia Yuknavitch (The Chronology of Water specifically), Adrienne Rich, Natalie Diaz, Ocean Vuong, Denise Levertov, Lucille Clifton, June Jordan, Gloria Anzaldúa, Jubi Arriola-Headley, Maureen Seaton, Mia Leonin, Jaswinder Bolina, Cass Donish, Jessica Jacobs, Olga Broumas, Elizabeth Bradfield (and so many others!).
The most influential work that has shaped this collection is Natalie-Scenters Zapico’s Lima::Limón, for the title and for the gendered dynamics and lyrical voice that are brought forth throughout this collection.
Q: Poetry for Life™ is little infinite’s mantra, we’re about making it easier to carry poetry through different phases of your life. Poetry for Life can hold sentiment in various aspects according to the person, which is why we love it. What does “Poetry for Life” mean to you?
I also find this mantra to be incredibly impactful. I deeply believe that poetry can be a part of anyone’s life, whether they’re conscious of it or not. During celebrations, for example, many people look towards poetry. On the darker side of this, people tend to reach out for consolation during grief or other difficult moments in one’s existence. For poets especially, however, “poetry for life” is the truth. We think and speak in poetry; we dream in poetic language and metaphors too. In short, poetry is what carries us, lifts us up, connects us, and helps us live, to our fullest capacity.
Her Advice:
Q: What does writer’s block mean to you? What advice do you have for writers who experience writer’s block?
I think writer’s block means there is a sort of interruption or rupture in the soul; something is stopping me from writing because I’m not in the right headspace, or I’m going through a difficult situation and I can’t look beyond it yet. Writer’s block also comes about when I’m too scared to write the hard things.
For writers who experience writer’s block: I want to bring in the magic of Maureen Seaton and Mia Leonin. They are two mentors who taught me who to play unabashedly, off the page, veer into the dreamworld and not leave for a while. Both Maureen and Mia value the art of collaboration. It gets rid of that sense of control us writers tend to feel we need but which actually hinders us. Oulipo / surrealist exercises also assist in getting us to think in different, strange ways. Lastly, Mia introduced the line game called “papelitos”, where you write lines on small pieces of paper. Then you cut them out and fold them. The “papelitos” get shuffled in a box or some sort of container, and then each person picks out a line. Then they have to write a poem inspired / starting with that line.
Q: What do you think makes a good poetry collection?
This is a tricky question. I’ve seen so many different ways in which poets achieve greatness within their poetry collections. I think there has to be an equilibrium between the more technical, structural components with the more poetic. The beginning, middle, and ending poems should be the stronger ones. I also think there should be a controlled tension between “hot” and “cold” temperatures in a poem. This concept I’ve taken from Martha Rhodes’ craft talks. Most importantly, a good collection feels alive. It builds a world one can step into and stay in for a while. Even after one finishes reading it, it keeps echoing inside their mind. Much like a song one can’t get out of their head.
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Q: Where can we find you?
Website:
https://clayrebenzadon.com/
Instagram:
@clayrebenz
TikTok:
@clayrebenz
