Two Cats in the Yard

The poems in Lin Nelson Benedek’s moving and joyful new collection - which takes its playful title from Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s iconic counterculture anthem of hippie domesticity, ＂Our House＂ - trace the intricate material and psychic vistas of one’s bittersweet relationship to home. Throughout these praise-poems, elegies, travelogues, family portraits, love poems, and prose interludes, Benedek reveals the ways in which home will always be the most contradictory and confounding of our life’s beloveds. In Two Cats in the Yard, we discover how the notion of belonging - to a child, a long marriage, a California landscape, a cultural moment - becomes a sacred yet irreconcilable act of the mind, a process of honoring home as both a timebound place and a limitless state of perpetual reckoning.

-Anna Journey, author, The Judas Ear

In this captivating collection, home is a physical place, an emotional state, an iridescent, multi-faceted fulcrum on which so much balances - family, history, nature, dear cats, and future hopes. Yet, joy is tempered by the contradictions inherent in return. The magnificent ordinary and the existential tangle as Benedek contemplates what it means to be grounded - after many travels, within a long relationship, and literally on land where a house is built for family members. The edge of time is ever present as the poet shares the shifting parameters around how to define home.

3/4Elline Lipkin, author, Girl in a Forest

Lin Benedek’s Two Cats in the Yardis a lyrical and luscious cataloguing of the small and sacred moments you clutch close. Throughout the collection, the speaker travels through time, countries, generations, and grief, generously allowing the reader to hold hands with the lessons and longing love leaves behind. Sonically playful and narratively driven, written with levity and depth, Benedek’s poems guide us through a life that feels smoothed at the creases, worn wise by gratitude. Two Cats in the Yardfeels like an intimate, warm conversation with an old friend, a conversation you never want to end.

-Kelly Grace Thomas, author, Boat Burned