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Honeyfish
“These poems love. Prophesize. Return us to our beginnings. To
days that we want to remember. Or forget. But don’t. Thus in our
sister’s memory, we survive in the luxury of dying. The courage of
loving. The re-imagining of our souls for another generation. Thank
you, my dear sister for your words saluting our living, our lives.”
—Sonia Sanchez, winner of the 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award
from the Academy of American Poets
“In exquisitely crafted poems of heart-accelerating candor and
clarity, Lauren K. Alleyne says to all the black bodies slain by hatred
and militarized fear, ‘Nothing I say will save you, but how can I say
nothing?’ Honeyfish is an elegy for all the countless lost, and a praise
song for the many black lives that persist in their wish to give and
receive love.”
— Tracy K. Smith, Poet Laureate of the United States of America
“Even in the places we think of as most beautiful, the endless gong
of the body being broken and defiled will find us. How can we see
the sun and the ocean and the clear blue sky as anything other than
a kind of cruel joke in the face of so much suffering? The extraordinary gift of Lauren K Alleyne’s, Honeyfish is that she shows
the world in all its brutality and loss and somehow lets us mourn within the poems, which in
turn allows us to begin some kind of healing. These are poems whose elegy is ongoing, whose
elegy need never happened but for hatred. The waves go in and out and so many people keep
being killed. And here is this extraordinary poet, making a heaven that is freedom, that is the
dream of being welcomed and loved and tended to. This is a book for our times and for the
day when these times are over and we can rejoice.”
— Gabrielle Calvacoressi, author of Rocket Fantastic
days that we want to remember. Or forget. But don’t. Thus in our
sister’s memory, we survive in the luxury of dying. The courage of
loving. The re-imagining of our souls for another generation. Thank
you, my dear sister for your words saluting our living, our lives.”
—Sonia Sanchez, winner of the 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award
from the Academy of American Poets
“In exquisitely crafted poems of heart-accelerating candor and
clarity, Lauren K. Alleyne says to all the black bodies slain by hatred
and militarized fear, ‘Nothing I say will save you, but how can I say
nothing?’ Honeyfish is an elegy for all the countless lost, and a praise
song for the many black lives that persist in their wish to give and
receive love.”
— Tracy K. Smith, Poet Laureate of the United States of America
“Even in the places we think of as most beautiful, the endless gong
of the body being broken and defiled will find us. How can we see
the sun and the ocean and the clear blue sky as anything other than
a kind of cruel joke in the face of so much suffering? The extraordinary gift of Lauren K Alleyne’s, Honeyfish is that she shows
the world in all its brutality and loss and somehow lets us mourn within the poems, which in
turn allows us to begin some kind of healing. These are poems whose elegy is ongoing, whose
elegy need never happened but for hatred. The waves go in and out and so many people keep
being killed. And here is this extraordinary poet, making a heaven that is freedom, that is the
dream of being welcomed and loved and tended to. This is a book for our times and for the
day when these times are over and we can rejoice.”
— Gabrielle Calvacoressi, author of Rocket Fantastic
- GenresPoetry
57 pages, Paperback
First published April 15, 2019
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114 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
December 21, 2024
2024:
"I'm a woman with skin
that summons crosses and flame.
Which is to say I am always burning.
Which is to say I do not have enough
tears to put myself out."
from "Self Portrait with Burning Crosses"
Capacious and limitless feel the realms of Lauren K. Alleyne's Honeyfish. How fortunate, to abide here, in a Black woman speaker's rippling, renewing majesties -- such thanks for these poems that make it impossible not to cavort in her feral abundance, her badmind, her sun-slick, sea-dappled worlds.
***
2020:
This prize-winning second collection from US-based Trinidadian Lauren K. Alleyne is an even deeper excavation of the potent mineral ore brought to the surface in her debut, Difficult Fruit. Alleyne’s pen does what so much poetry, for all its pulchritude, does not do: it confronts and names the enemy, the perpetrators of anti-blackness, the Klan-inspired marchers who would desecrate Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice’s deaths. Not so fast, say the poems in Honeyfish, cutting through the rhetoric of hatred with the accuracy of a butcher’s cleaver separating offal from steak. What the poet serves us is the raw heart meat of love, the praise of an ineffable, indestructible blackness prized by the sun itself. Here, black beauty roams, cavorts, and survives without apology, each line insistent in reclaiming joy amid the mourning processions, against the grain of unlawful death.
[This micro-review appears in the Jan/Feb 2020 Bookshelf of Caribbean Beat Magazine, where I serve as Book Reviews Editor: https://www.caribbean-beat.com/issue-...
"I'm a woman with skin
that summons crosses and flame.
Which is to say I am always burning.
Which is to say I do not have enough
tears to put myself out."
from "Self Portrait with Burning Crosses"
Capacious and limitless feel the realms of Lauren K. Alleyne's Honeyfish. How fortunate, to abide here, in a Black woman speaker's rippling, renewing majesties -- such thanks for these poems that make it impossible not to cavort in her feral abundance, her badmind, her sun-slick, sea-dappled worlds.
***
2020:
This prize-winning second collection from US-based Trinidadian Lauren K. Alleyne is an even deeper excavation of the potent mineral ore brought to the surface in her debut, Difficult Fruit. Alleyne’s pen does what so much poetry, for all its pulchritude, does not do: it confronts and names the enemy, the perpetrators of anti-blackness, the Klan-inspired marchers who would desecrate Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice’s deaths. Not so fast, say the poems in Honeyfish, cutting through the rhetoric of hatred with the accuracy of a butcher’s cleaver separating offal from steak. What the poet serves us is the raw heart meat of love, the praise of an ineffable, indestructible blackness prized by the sun itself. Here, black beauty roams, cavorts, and survives without apology, each line insistent in reclaiming joy amid the mourning processions, against the grain of unlawful death.
[This micro-review appears in the Jan/Feb 2020 Bookshelf of Caribbean Beat Magazine, where I serve as Book Reviews Editor: https://www.caribbean-beat.com/issue-...
March 22, 2020
Beautiful!
Read
September 13, 2020Lovely collection I picked up in Greenlight. Enjoyed a whole lot.
July 28, 2019
Gifted poet Lauren K. Alleyne has given us the handbook for how to live in a difficult world, a world where the black body is in constant peril, where the climate is collapsing and the comforts of home and family are far away. Honeyfish is portal and companion for how to be a pilgrim in a fragmented world mined with dangers and myths, and shows us how to see the numinous within every ordinary thing.
Honeyfish offers a language for grieving unbearable loss, and for getting out the door the next day. It's an elegy of furious grace and an ode to ruthless beauty, an acknowledgement of the "beautiful sting" of being alive among the ruins. It's a guide for navigating relationships and distance, memory and possibility, absence and return.
These poems burst with despair and grace, beauty and fury, grief and survival. They're beautifully polished, perfect in every line, and each one leads you gently into the presence of an unbearably hard, crushingly perfect truth. Thank goodness we have poets like Lauren K. Alleyne who can teach us how to bear the world's losses and still hold our love for beauty.
Find my longer review, with lots of stolen lines, at femmeliterate
Honeyfish offers a language for grieving unbearable loss, and for getting out the door the next day. It's an elegy of furious grace and an ode to ruthless beauty, an acknowledgement of the "beautiful sting" of being alive among the ruins. It's a guide for navigating relationships and distance, memory and possibility, absence and return.
These poems burst with despair and grace, beauty and fury, grief and survival. They're beautifully polished, perfect in every line, and each one leads you gently into the presence of an unbearably hard, crushingly perfect truth. Thank goodness we have poets like Lauren K. Alleyne who can teach us how to bear the world's losses and still hold our love for beauty.
Find my longer review, with lots of stolen lines, at femmeliterate
March 17, 2019
"Brimming with so much /open," Alleyne deftly braids elegies for and odes to black bodies, demanding we witness what is happening in the US and speak out against this systemic racism. Other poems explore what it means to be home or to be absent from that home. She takes us to the island, ever shifting between the Caribbean and Greece and her own body. Such beautiful poems.
April 23, 2020
Love it. Lauren's work is so beautiful.
April 26, 2021
"I watched the video/ and wished I hadn't/ and knew I had to// witness the boy/ being a boy before/ he becomes a corpse..." A charged, essential collection that honors the victims of police killings and investigates our complicity and the edges of our humanity.
November 14, 2021
Every year the Best American Poetry introduces me to a new poet. And this was my 2021 introduction. The title poem is astonishing.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews