“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 unique talent, Alleyne’s skilled lines levitate with something more: passion, grace, and a willingness to ask questions that linger.”
— The Millions
