Honey with Tobacco (Phoenix Poets)

ISBN: 0226069672

Author: Boyers, Peg

Condition: New

PietThis time the migraine came with a visionbathed in night sweat:I was sitting on the Eames chair,your mans body on my lap, legsand arms white as casein draped overmine, spilling onto the cassock, new soreson your legs, dried bloodon your feet and hands,from your chalk mouththe words forgive me,from mine, the impossiblenoHard Bread,Peg Boyerss debut poetry collection, with verse spoken in the imagined voice of the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg, was widely praised for its inspired ventriloquism and its brilliant lyricism. In Honey with Tobacco, Boyerss own intensely personal voice emerges in three strikingly distinctive variants. The first part of the book is the most explicitly autobiographical, bringing together poems that explore the poets Cuban American experience and a childhood marked by travel, the tropics, and varieties of disenchantment. The middle sequence of poems concerns a mother, a father, and a son, a postmodern holy family whose ordeals are evoked in a terse, terrifying narrative. In familiar tableaux drawn from the Bible that have inspired great works of art-the Annunciation, the Pieta, and Judgment Day-Boyers explores what it means in contemporary America to be blessed among women and whether and how art can contain grief. The final section of the book confronts age, desire, and regret in a series of personal poems that plumb baser human instincts and the speakers determination to dwell in darkness, when necessary, without abandoning the sacred.Praise for Hard Bread:A great achievement of poetic voice . . . . Its absolutely clear what these poems are about, and they are unapologetic in their devotion to subject, clarity, precision, and accessibility.-Steven Cramer, Poetry