And So Wax Was Made & Also Honey

by Amy Beeder

Overview

Beeder’s third collection, And So Wax Was Made & Also Honey brims with lyrical invention and dark wit. In this lush universe, Hermes moonlights as a process server and malaria croons a love song; saints emerge from beans while Kronos and Eros argue at a local bar: ‘love’s nothing/but glimmer-to-wither, dawn’s fireflies expired.’ In language singularly baroque and hypnotic, Beeder takes us on a wild poetic adventure: this book is, as Dana Levin says, “a treasure-house wizarding through time,” through landscapes ancient and present, real and reimagined: gold mine to Victorian graveyard, a fair’s midway to The House of Être, from ‘late Holocene out to the farthest buoy’.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781946482365
Publisher:	Tupelo Press
Publication date:	12/01/2020
Pages:	62
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x 0.19(d)

About the Author

Amy Beeder is the author of Burn the Field and Now Make An Altar (Carnegie Mellon University Press). A recipient of an NEA Fellowship, a Discovery, The Nation Award and a James Merrill Fellowship, she has worked as a creative writing instructor, freelance writer, reporter, political asylum specialist, sous-chef, high-school teacher in West Africa, and an election and human rights observer in Haiti and Suriname. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, AGNI, The Southern Review and many other journals. She lives in Albuquerque.

Editorial Reviews

11/16/2020

The historical and fantastical mingle in gleeful harmony in the richly imagined third collection from Beeder (Now Make Me an Altar). Inventive titles suggest the poet’s varied sources of inspiration; “Letter from Inmate 0709-609” is a riff on a missive from an incarcerated person seeking advice about his poetry. It grows darker as the writer confesses his crime: “...the boys who finally/ found her thought at first dog bones but/ then a sneaker.” Beeder has a penchant for scientific phenomena and the occult, as evidenced in several poems titled “A Practical Guide to Hand Analysis.” Her talent for combining evocative images with rich sensory language is on display in the Thomas Hardy–inspired “Sir Say Pray,” featuring milkmaids “cream-skinned, gathering toad-spume on skirts relentlessly cracking the snails underfoot.” In “Lithium Dreams,” the poet writes an origin story for the salt flats of Bolivia: “Once, volcanoes walked & talked like/ humans. Married. Quarreled & gave birth./ When the beautiful Tunupa’s/ husband ran away & took their only child/ she mourned:/ ...until she made this sunken bed, a dry &/ ragged ice-white sea.” These intriguing poems are a pleasure to read. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

This book is a linguistic achievement, kinetically rigorous and hypnotic. From shudder to pleasure, we follow Beeder's electrified romp through impertinent history, traveling underworld and round the world. A book of all sorts of histories, science, ciphers and techniques. Read these percussive poems aloud: the swaddled diction rolling, tripping, stuttering out of you. "The end comes...so quick your snare of nerves will never sense it."

--Lauren Camp

Amy Beeder's poems are willfully baroque in their concatenations, committed to a sensuality of language that might, in other hands, smother its charms. But Beeder's touch remains so witty, so light, that even the densest language vaults clean over the phenomena it purports to describe. Reading Beeder is like taking an ornate, perhaps even gilded, chartered gondola to a mysterious island only to discover that Ashbery arrived there decades ago and has already opened both a research institute and a lawn-and-garden boutique.

--G.C. Waldrep

... For me, the deepest drive of this book revealed itself in the fantastic "Leviathan." Read that poem and weep, and laugh, and, as with so many of the poems here, encounter Beeder as a medium, bringing words and phrasing back to us we thought long gone. This book is a verbal treasure-house wizarding through time.

Dana Levin

... For me, the deepest drive of this book revealed itself in the fantastic "Leviathan." Read that poem and weep, and laugh, and, as with so many of the poems here, encounter Beeder as a medium, bringing words and phrasing back to us we thought long gone. This book is a verbal treasure-house wizarding through time.

--Dana Levin

From the Publisher