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Honeyfish

Honeyfish

by Lauren K. Alleyne
Honeyfish

Honeyfish

by Lauren K. Alleyne

Overview

“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

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Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781936970599
Publisher: New Issues Poetry and Prose
Publication date: 04/15/2019
Pages: 57
Sales rank: 1,140,866
Product dimensions: (w) x (h) x 0.40(d)

Table of Contents

I

Poetry Workshop after the Verdict 7

How to Watch Your Son Die 9

Killed Boy, Beautiful World 10

Trojan Sun 11

Post-Verdict Renga 12

Play 14

The Pain Fair 15

Still Life with Empty Beach 17

Self-Portrait with Impending War 18

Untitled 19

Elegy for a Fish-as-Weathervane 21

August, Charlottesville 22

Grace: A Lamentation 23

Heaven? 24

Questions from the Rock 25

II

Ode to My Parents 29

Inventing a Lineage on the Day My Mother's Mother Is Buried 30

I Am Instructed 32

When Daughters Drown Their Fathers 34

On the Bridge of a Border between Two Countries 35

Visa Villanelle 37

Gretel of the Caribbean 38

Return 39

Self-Portrait on the Anniversary of His Death 40

She Who Wears Horns and Weeps 41

Madame X- 43

Nostalgia Negra 44

Self-Portrait with Neo-Nazi Demonstration 45

Horror, Too, Has a Heartbeat 46

The Manager's Tips for Working at the San Francisco Restaurant and Bar 47

After 18 Years, the Immigrant Goes to Therapy 48

Variations in Blue 49

Dis/Location 51

Self-Portrait with Burning Crosses 52

Prodigal 54

III

What the Living Know 59

Arrival 60

Red Pilgrimage 61

Maypole 63

Kalimera 64

Kalinichta 65

Taverna Alexandria 66

Portrait 67

Blue 68

Return 69

Home in the Key of Absence 70

Father, Christmas 71

Ode to the Fish-as-Weathervane 72

What Night Knows 73

Honeyfish 74

Elegy for the Closing 75

Ode to Ghosts 76

Elegy 77

A Gathering of Light 78

Reading among the Ruins 79

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