Grim Honey - by Jessica Barksdale (Paperback)
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<p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br><p>The hardest sweet is sharp to the tongue, painful, cutting, and often divine. The poems in Jessica Barksdale's collection <em>Grim Honey</em> follow thin paths of grief, up through steep switchbacks and down the rocky declines into the meadows, where for a moment, we can pause and remember before moving on. The speakers in these poems open to their sorrows and passions and then push forward into stories that-while understood-are still evolving. Barksdale moves through issues of family, love, and death, delving into what is beautiful as completely as what is not to show the fullness of life.</p><p/><br></br><p><b> Review Quotes </b></p></br></br><br><p><em>Grim Honey</em> explores the messiness of the human body and a constellation of losses. Barksdale writes with great verve and energy about every subject from family to travel to death. There's an urgency to these poems, a persistence in all things, whether it's the writing itself or the cataloguing of the world's beauties and tragedies. She knows how to turn a curse into a benediction, an old kitchen into the site of new memories, each pain into the story of a deeply lived life. -Traci Brimhall, author of <em>Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod and Rookery</em></p><p><br></p><p>In the staggering "Hand-Painted", Jessica Barksdale tells us "[h]e would start one project /and move to the next, / never imagining / he'd die before / completing any." Everything exists as it is, until alchemy happens-a potent and blunt mythic or natural world is invoked. In "Three Sisters", we watch a personal mythology unfold, "the Easter queens, daughters / to our father, rain in the distance. // Time dripped itself loose, and we were still three / but now at war." In this quietly direct way, new truths are imparted. The generosity of these lessons on decisiveness and focus through the shifting of grief-the many dimensions of the depths of knowing and loving-are meted with great care. This model of growth offers the reader wisdom for how to open and move with a consistently transforming world. -Kari Flickinger, author of <em>The Gull and the Bell Tower</em> </p><p><br></p><p>Good poems anchor us with vivid detail and provocative language. In Jessica Barksdale's collection, <em>Grim Honey</em>, these poems prove no exception. In the title poem, we see a dead sister as both memory and comet, hurtling toward us unbidden, "a sweet, ambered fossil / slicing my tongue / with each sharp lick." Death and loss continue their journey through Barksdale's poems, as in "This is It," which remind us lest we forget, "we are here / and then we are not." Yet Barksdale finds the sweetness in every moment, in friendships, in parenting, in life: "Stacked one on top the other / the little things become / the big things / become your tagline / your nom de plume, your / mantra, your slogan / your signature dish." Grim Honey is about what awaits when we examine our lives and remember that they are, inextricably, always our own. - Darien Hsu Gee, author of <em>Other Small Histories</em></p><br>
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