The title of this new collection tells the reader a lot: Honey Mine. Honey, that viscous product of the hive, both nutrient and excess, sweet and sticky. Mine — the possessive pronoun and noun, as in gold mine.
Among lesbians the story is a form of sex talk — a joint whereby the community and the couple are of the same body (155)
C. R. Grimmer’s debut full-length collection The Lyme Letters uses epistolary form to document the character R.’s navigation of their life as a person with chronic Lyme disease. R., Grimmer’s brave and thoughtful nonbinary femme protagonist, addresses the poems to their doctor, their therapist, their dog and cat, and to a series of intimate composite beings whose appellations each repeat as the title of multiple poems.
C. R. Grimmer’s debut full-length collection The Lyme Letters uses epistolary form to document the character R.’s navigation of their life as a person with chronic Lyme disease.
Photo of S*an D. Henry-Smith (left) by Ian Lewandowski.
Wild Peach, S*an D. Henry-Smith’s collection of poems and photographs, is atmospheric: its poems hang in a mist at the top of the page. They touch down gently, then cling to the surface for a moment before they soak into my reading skin. There’s a sonic fog to them, a quality of density as alliteration and internal resonances accumulate.
What does it really mean when we say, “well, how the story all began was …” or “the real story is …” or “what really happened was …” or “what I remember was …”? What happens in those thought-moments?
For me, that tension between poetry, writing, and drawing is utterly captivating. So much so that I have spent the last two years writing poems that enter into conversations with Twombly’s work, a project I have found both humbling and transformative. In fact, the last real public outing I engaged in before the pandemic lockdown was a visit to the Cy Twombly Gallery at the Menil Collection in Houston.
Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. — Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation”[1]
