The Bees Have Been Canceled: Poems

by Maya C. Popa

"The poems in The Bees Have Been Canceled are ravenous, rich, and exquisitely built. Maya Catherine Popa's language makes visible how yearning tethers the mind to the world and how hurt spawns an astonishing self-awareness. Her gaze alights on beauty and violence; it 'scurries from birth to blight.' Such attentive looking brings closer the brokenness of the world. This gaze is also restorative; it alleviates and mends and delights." --Eduardo C. Corral "Maya Catherine Popa's The Bees Have Been Canceled is haunted by violence and catastrophe, by the consequences of human desire turned to incommensurate ends, and anxious about the resources of language. There are no glib answers, only a certain kind of belief (the kind Emily Dickinson might recognize) embodied afresh in poems that are richly textured, and filled with energy, wit, and intelligence. Popa's work is serious, but there's joy here, too, in a balance that defies gravity." --Averill Curdy

Genres: Poetry

48 pages, Paperback

First published February 15, 2017

Reviews

[Margaryta · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poems in this chapbook are united by a shared interest in exploring the duality of endings and beginnings. The "[Blank] Have Been Canceled" series of poems in particular have a touch of the dystopian to them that is mitigated by how real and startlingly familiar the events are, how applicable and increasingly plausible they are. Popa writes with a beauty and wit that has been stripped of any pretension, as her meditation on the difference between writing and painting attests. A perfect chapbook and a poetic gift.

[Marti Leimbach · Rating 5 out of 5]

An early work of Maya Popa's, the book remains one of my favourite poetry books of all time.