Honeyfish

“These poems love. Prophesize. Return us to our beginnings. Todays that we want to remember. Or forget. But don’t. Thus in oursister’s memory, we survive in the luxury of dying. The courage ofloving. The re-imagining of our souls for another generation. Thankyou, my dear sister for your words saluting our living, our lives.”—Sonia Sanchez, winner of the 2018 Lifetime Achievement Awardfrom the Academy of American Poets“In exquisitely crafted poems of heart-accelerating candor andclarity, Lauren K. Alleyne says to all the black bodies slain by hatredand militarized fear, ‘Nothing I say will save you, but how can I saynothing?’ Honeyfish is an elegy for all the countless lost, and a praisesong for the many black lives that persist in their wish to give andreceive love.”— Tracy K. Smith, Poet Laureate of the United States of America“Even in the places we think of as most beautiful, the endless gongof the body being broken and defiled will find us. How can we seethe sun and the ocean and the clear blue sky as anything other thana kind of cruel joke in the face of so much suffering? The extraordinary gift of Lauren K Alleyne’s, Honeyfish is that she showsthe world in all its brutality and loss and somehow lets us mourn within the poems, which inturn allows us to begin some kind of healing. These are poems whose elegy is ongoing, whoseelegy need never happened but for hatred. The waves go in and out and so many people keepbeing killed. And here is this extraordinary poet, making a heaven that is freedom, that is thedream of being welcomed and loved and tended to. This is a book for our times and for theday when these times are over and we can rejoice.”— Gabrielle Calvacoressi, author of Rocket Fantastic