[3] According to a critical anthology of essays about Ben-Simhon, she was a bright student and identified in elementary school as having a gift for literature.

Ben-Simhon's work deals with issues relating to gender, ethnicity, class, culture and politics.

"[5] She wrote about racial stigmas, about societal power relations, about growing up poor, and living in a society where you "cannot gain entrance by being good", because you do not have the correct identity profile.

[8] Mutual acquaintances said that Wieseltier treated her in a condescending manner, and according to researcher and poet Mati Shemoelof, it is far from coincidental that one of her best-known poems in this collection is about the inferior status of a Mizrahi woman and the stereotypical way Mizrahi women are sexualized and dismissed as uninformed and unintelligent.

[6]Critic Eli Hirsch disagrees: "Attempting to attribute a central role to Wieseltier not only in her biography but also in the understanding of her poetry seems problematic to me.

"[5] In 2017, a documentary film about Ben-Simhon's life, Miriam's Song (Ahava Mitrageshet Lavo) was created by filmmakers Eldad Boganim and Israel Winkler, with screenwriter Dan Albo.

[12] The film includes a recording from 1988, which was discovered by chance, after her death, in which Ben-Simhon reads a love letter to the poet Meir Wieseltier.