Dinner Table Refuge

by Benjamin Schmitt

Poet Benjamin Schmitt attacks topics that are avoided at the dinner table. He takes on depression, politics, religion, what might happen if zombies took over Seattle, and many other subjects.

"Benjamin Schmitt’s poems rage against fading summers and aristocrats, young love and guilt, bears and zombies, time travel and “robot bones”. The reader follows this dance of language where “chairs face inward to the swinging skies”, bears explore a “treatise on marshmallows” and a boy believes he can breathe lives on a neckline. Full of blood and sex and beasts, Schmitt eloquently captures the voice of today’s youth in the vein of the fictional Holden Caulfield." - Matthew E. Silverman, founder and managing editor, Blue Lyra Review

"From surreal to sublime, from personal to profane, Benjamin Schmitt’s poetry takes the reader on a journey through a thousand landscapes of the mind and the body. Chanted in a thousand tongues, this is youthful, exuberant poetry laced with threads of wisdom wound up with gritty observations of an oil-soaked world gone mad." - Jack Remick, Poet and Novelist

118 pages, Paperback

Published November 12, 2015

About the author

Benjamin Schmitt is the Elgin Award-nominated author of five books, most recently Satan’s School for Girls and Other Works (Goldfish Press, 2026). His writing has appeared in Sojourners, Antioch Review, The MacGuffin, Sensitive Skin, Hobart, Columbia Review, The Seattle Times, and elsewhere. A co-founder of Pacifica Writers’ Workshop, he lives in Seattle with his children.

Reviews

[Allison · Rating 4 out of 5]

I met Ben through my now-husband, but since we moved haven't had many chances to hang out. His poetry is raw and overflows. His style is sometimes different than what I usually seek out in poetry, but he explores fearlessly the connections between things and events of his own life.