Cover Art by Michael Hafftka
Now Available from Get Fresh Books
Winner of the Bisexual Poetry Award (Watch the Awards Reading Here on Youtube)
“Ben-Oni’s speaker constantly gives us meta: she basks in the cultural references of her childhood, yet she transcends them. If popular culture serves as commentary that combines the politics and social critiques of a time period, then the poet takes this up ten notches, presenting popular culture from both her coming-of-age youth and the present moment in time....I read turn around, BRXGHT XYXS as a poetic striptease" —POETRY
“In her second collection, Rosebud Ben-Oni invokes Matarose, an alter ego persona, to write a book-length love poem to the self that would make Whitman both proud and blush. Ben-Oni’s poems are ecstatically and unabashedly feminist, queer, punk, Latinx, and Jewish, making hers a unique and vital voice for our times.” —Chicago Review of Books
"The propulsion and scope of Ben-Oni's poems— engaging everything from biblical figures to '80s music— give each word an exhilarating amount of power... turn around, BRXGHT XYXS audaciously owns its otherness, traveling the world—and the universe—without losing sight of the United States we now inhabit." —Jewish Currents
"She exists as golem, as wild beast, as Axolotl. She burns; she roars... The highs in the collection are moonshots…Ben-Oni’s turbocharged collection teaches us not to fear the pain of the past, even as that pain eclipses the heart." — Rhino Poetry
“Ben-Oni sets out to tell a transformational story of someone who has always been labeled as “too much,” who feels the big, raucous feelings, and yet who is not inevitably beaten down by the world but survives it. Even thrives in it. Harnessing the power of darkness, accepting love’s place in it, and becoming the monster leads to happiness, acceptance, and a grander love. Ben-Oni doesn’t ask us to believe in the relationship between monsters and love, she forces us to know, at our very core, that the two are intertwined.”— Queen Mobs
"Rosebud Ben-Oni is her own genre.” —Dorothy K. Chan on “I Guess We’ll Have to Be Secretly in Love with Each Other & Leave It at That” as one of her Favorite Poems of the Decade
Hear Tracy K. Smith read “Dancing with Kiko on the Moon” featured over at The Slowdown
Read “Dancing with Kiko on the Moon” featured over at Poetry Society of America
Listen to Social Distance Reading Series presented by Green Mountains Review & The Vermont School
A 2020 pick for CLMP’s "Reading List for Pride Month & Beyond”
A 2019 favorite in Queen Mob’s Review
Read a playlist of poems featured over at VERSE
Interviews with: The Rumpus (Featured over at The Poetry Foundation) | EcoTheo I Radio Free Brooklyn’s Ep. 93: The Power Nucleus
ADVANCED PRAISE
From “Dancing with Kiko on the Moon” featured on The Slowdown
turn around, BRXGHT XYXS saunters into the reader’s mind like a super sly and seductive voice as ravenous as it is many: a younger-tagging self—Matarose—who "never comes home" declaring her love to some "evil woman of xanadu," and another, who leaves her with only a "Whistling/ Like a fist of the bank in wet/ Season lying through her teeth." Refracted through the lenses of Latinidad, lost love and those "drug restaurants/ that serve only cobra lilies/ with a side of blackbirds/who wield spiked hammers," turn around, B R X G H T X Y X S takes its delight in the chase and not the catch, what is "all the dark side moonwalking after" an uncatchable "you.” turn around, BRXGHT XYXS will seduce you silly, purring lyrical excesses while Matarose "wears her sunglasses at night/ where exploding stars fall/ shock breakout bright." — J. Michael Martinez
In turn around BRXGHT XYXS, Rosebud Ben-Oni opens by summoning Matarose—her alter-ego “muse on roller skates”—a wildly original voice that channels K-pop, hip hop, and the intersectional mestiza soul of the entire borough of Queens to create a sound-driven howling lyric paean—an ecstatic queer broken love-song that’s equal parts Bonnie Tyler and bible, Prince and prayer, and 100% pure desire. Ben-Oni’s poems conjure fierce feminist magic to create a simultaneous ode and lament of a book that reminds us we are the sum of all the parts of our selves: our roots and contradictory loves, all the things we’re born into and out of, the corporeal experiences we only sometimes choose—and she brings it all home with power, humor, grace, and lines like this: “This is my blood and this / my body this time / you won’t betray me / I am your kingdom come.” — Erika Meitner
Mercy, these poems will reawaken a wilderness you swore you’d lost the map to. Ben-Oni is doing sacred work here, strutting across the asperous terrain of our modern world with a queer femme sovereignty that intoxicates and heals; at the center of each poem, a fragrant mosh pit. These are the ruthless texts we bitches deserve—poems that drive their readers into feral ascension—until the claws can’t be pulled back in. — Rachel McKibbens
Rosebud Ben-Oni is an incomparable poet with a voice like no one else. Her poetic work hails from the crossroads of countries and culture, tongues and taboo. Ben-Oni's poetic work hails. At play is a potent poetics of vortices of word and act, love y Justicia. She speaks to Latinidad in “having hope/ in our pop-up whit of the world..../ to never having really left Jerusalem..../ To the hours we (make) horses between nightfall/ and war…” Turn around. BRXGHT XYXS in the house! — Lorna Dee Cervantes