Honey with tobacco / Peg Boyers.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Boyers, Peggy, 1952-

Series:

Phoenix poets

Language:

English

Physical Description:

ix, 59 pages ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Summary:

Hard Bread, Peg Boyers's debut poetry collection, with verse spoken in the imagined voice of the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg, was widely praised for its inspired ventriloquism and brilliant lyricism. In Honey with Tobacco, Boyers's 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 poet's 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.

Contents:

I Honey with Tobacco

La Tuveria or An Earring's Lament 3

Machine of Regret 6

Agua de Violetas 7

Tobacco 11

Playa Colorada 14

Family Portrait 16

Mantilla 19

Transition: Inheriting Maps 21

Abanico Habanero 24

II Deposition

1 Before Losing You at the Market, Finding You in the Temple 29

2 The Effects of Intemperance 30

3 Sacra Conversazione 31

4 Annunciation 33

5 Palm Sunday 34

6 Agony in the Garden 35

7 Deposition 37

8 The Bad Thief is a Mother 39

9 Pieta 40

10 Cup 41

11 Judgment Day 43

12 Lamentation 45

13 Genuine Repose During the Flight from Egypt 47

14 Catch 49

Time Orders Old Age to Destroy Beauty 53

Bitch Diary 55

Pentecost: Waiting 57

Forty Days 58.

ISBN:

9780226069661

0226069664

9780226069678

0226069672

OCLC:

70176887

Online:

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