Honey & Smoke
I’m not sure why everyone isn’t talking about Sean Singer. His new poems are absolutely extraordinary. What he’s up to is very important.—Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Stegner Fellow and author of Rocket Fantastic
Published by Eyewear Publishing (2015) with endorsements from Tracy K. Smith, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Amy Newman.
Read poems from Honey & Smoke in CURA, Hamilton Stone Review, and Guernica.
Buy Honey & Smoke at Bookshop.
Buy Honey & Smoke at Small Press Distribution
About HONEY & SMOKE
My second book of poems, Honey & Smoke, uses a range of hybrid forms including lyric poetry, long lines, nonfiction non-poetry, and lyrical essay to address the ghosts of history: historical figures, the lives of other writers, jazz music, and writing itself. The poems show humor, intimacy, and a range of voices; language and music of obsession; the meaning of creative energy.
PRAISE FOR HONEY & SMOKE
These poems—featuring alternate takes on such historical figures as Kafka, Freud, Van Gogh, and Scott Joplin, to name just a few—use strange facts and an even stranger imaginative lens to expand our understanding of urge, fear, madness, and creativity. But that’s not all Honey & Smoke delivers. Singer’s pitch-perfect ear for verbal music adds a jittery, jazz-inflected visceral exhilaration to the experience of these poems. —Tracy K. Smith
Sean Singer’s Honey & Smoke is made of life’s raw lyrical energy, where jazz becomes a spiritual compass. The poet’s satirical wit drives each poem toward intimacy. There’s a buoyancy in this urgent collection, where the real world and the internal world converge. In other moments his characters—Kafka, Freud, van Gogh, Schulz—haunt the page. The collection is woven of a language that pushes against the rhetorical loopholes. Honey & Smoke holds us accountable, with a seemingly improvised veracity—a robust and generous cornucopia. —Yusef Komunyakaa
In the exquisite Honey & Smoke, Singer makes poetry inside of histories, like those bees who build honeycombs in the skull of a lion. Boundaries shift and thrill as readers encounter Freud, Hedy Lamarr, Larry Fine, Italo Svevo, Coppola’s The Conversation, Newark’s difficult history, jazz, and so much more. What a fitting title: the book’s smoky articulations fill the air as sweet architecture, as elegant shapes, piercing and blazing. —Amy Newman