A Dream in Which I Am Playing with Bees
Poems
Published on 31. January 2024
Book
Hardback
277 pages
978-1-68283-196-0 (ISBN)
Description
A Dream in Which I Am Playing with Bees is a collection of poems made of natural imagery, queer metaphors, personal observations, and historical circumstances surrounding honeybees. In the aftermath of a fictional bee extinction, these poems are presented to the post-bee reader as "artifacts." These are poems in hindsight.
Playing with Bees positions poetry in hindsight to contemplate poetry's "natural" inclinations towards building alternative worlds through earthbound metaphors. Whether in a line or an entire premise, none of the poems could think, speak, or see in the same way if bees-and the relations they make possible-suddenly disappeared. Like any natural resource, the bee is a wellspring of possibility. Essential. Fragile. Causal. And like any animal, the pollinating bee has enabled a diverse phylum of phrases and myths that humans trade to express our most hard-to-name feelings.
What changes about our imaginations after a peg in the environment is removed? What could disappear from our minds, our fantasies, and our self-descriptors, if nature is no longer a mirror?
Consider a museum of language. As artifacts, these poems are the residue of a dead species-but they are also the offshoots of a playful, abundant, delicate ecosystem. Playingwith Bees covets what's left. At the bottom of everything, we find the fragments an ecologically intact dream; an apocalypse in reverse.
Playing with Bees positions poetry in hindsight to contemplate poetry's "natural" inclinations towards building alternative worlds through earthbound metaphors. Whether in a line or an entire premise, none of the poems could think, speak, or see in the same way if bees-and the relations they make possible-suddenly disappeared. Like any natural resource, the bee is a wellspring of possibility. Essential. Fragile. Causal. And like any animal, the pollinating bee has enabled a diverse phylum of phrases and myths that humans trade to express our most hard-to-name feelings.
What changes about our imaginations after a peg in the environment is removed? What could disappear from our minds, our fantasies, and our self-descriptors, if nature is no longer a mirror?
Consider a museum of language. As artifacts, these poems are the residue of a dead species-but they are also the offshoots of a playful, abundant, delicate ecosystem. Playingwith Bees covets what's left. At the bottom of everything, we find the fragments an ecologically intact dream; an apocalypse in reverse.
Reviews / Votes
"In the introduction to this new collection of poems, A Dream in Which I Am Playing with Bees, RK Fauth tells us that the subsequent verses are 'artifacts' of a fictional world. The book itself is more of an assemblage of testimonies that support the imagined environment-a group of artifacts (poems) uncovered in the same archeological (fabled) context. In the aftermath of this chimerical calamity, the writer finds a space of infinite reflection wherein the intrinsic values of these precious creatures are examined in hindsight. The poetry doesn't follow the literal echoes of such a loss as much as the infinitude of metaphorical and cultural ripples, growing the more they spread through our dreams, our language, and our identities. In Fauth's brilliant collection of unearthed, lyrical artifacts, the poetry is volcanic and mesmerizing as it exposes the truth about our language-that it needs to be expressed to and for someone who can act, and that it exists in that space between and among things, in the relations between us. Fauth's poems guide us through the work needed to be done to reach out simply by looking in."-Mikal Wix, West Trade Review (January 2024)More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
College Station
United States
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Dimensions
Height: 230 mm
Width: 150 mm
Thickness: 20 mm
Weight
272 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-68283-196-0 (9781682831960)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
RK Fauth is a poet whose writing has appeared in POETRY, The Rising Phoenix Review, Blue Unicorn, Dream of the River: an LGBTQ+ Anthology, The Non Binary Review, The Fulbright Korea Infusion, and elsewhere. From 2019-2022, RK ran the award-winning public humanities project, "Unprecedented," which circulated Black Plague-era erasure poems between strangers. She earned an M.A. at Georgetown University, where she also served as a Poetry Fellow at the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice. RK lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, with her fiance and their two dogs.