Honeyfish

Honeyfish

<DIV>“These poems love. Prophesize. Return us to our beginnings. To<BR /> days that we want to remember. Or forget. But don’t. Thus in our<BR /> sister’s memory, we survive in the luxury of dying. The courage of<BR /> loving. The re-imagining of our souls for another generation. Thank<BR /> you, my dear sister for your words saluting our living, our lives.”<BR /> —Sonia Sanchez, winner of the 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award<BR /> from the Academy of American Poets<BR /> “In exquisitely crafted poems of heart-accelerating candor and<BR /> clarity, Lauren K. Alleyne says to all the black bodies slain by hatred<BR /> and militarized fear, ‘Nothing I say will save you, but how can I say<BR /> nothing?’ Honeyfish is an elegy for all the countless lost, and a praise<BR /> song for the many black lives that persist in their wish to give and<BR /> receive love.”<BR /> — Tracy K. Smith, Poet Laureate of the United States of America<BR /> “Even in the places we think of as most beautiful, the endless gong<BR /> of the body being broken and defiled will find us. How can we see<BR /> the sun and the ocean and the clear blue sky as anything other than<BR /> 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<BR /> the world in all its brutality and loss and somehow lets us mourn within the poems, which in<BR /> turn allows us to begin some kind of healing. These are poems whose elegy is ongoing, whose<BR /> elegy need never happened but for hatred. The waves go in and out and so many people keep<BR /> being killed. And here is this extraordinary poet, making a heaven that is freedom, that is the<BR /> dream of being welcomed and loved and tended to. This is a book for our times and for the<BR /> day when these times are over and we can rejoice.”<BR /> — Gabrielle Calvacoressi, author of Rocket Fantastic</DIV>