Bøger af Lauren K. Alleyne

"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

A collection of poems about coming into self-knowledge--of fighting for and winning personhood as a woman in the world--this offering from Trinidadian poet Lauren Alleyne grapples with personal experience. The poems form a lyric memoir of the author's life, chronicling a journey that includes coming to terms with violence and loss, celebrating love and connection, and standing witness in the world that shaped that journey. The central poem, "Eighteen," which narrates the aftermath of sexual assault, and another, "Thirty," which addresses the virtues of self-reliance, are representative of several poems of age that both chronicle and disrupt time, looking at the speaker's past as a way to understand the present. These poems are a movement through fracture--both necessary and unwarranted--toward wholeness and transformation. This debut collection introduces a striking new voice in poetry.