Honeysuckle Press is an independent press committed to forging & fortifying literary avenues that prioritize the narratives of unsung communities.

Deus Ex Nigrum by Jasmine Reid

2018 HONEYSUCKLE CHAPBOOK CONTEST POETRY WINNER

INTRODUCTION BY DANEZ SMITH

With its flora crossing boundaries, Deus Ex Nigrum is, above all else, an invitation to bloom. This chapbook of poems holds a speaker remapping her body, which travels from a site of betrayal to one of renewal. Enacted here is an interlocution of self and body, a configuration outside of canonical human experience, a trans speaker who so finds posterity & futurity in the surround of human being: flowers, seasons, satellitic cyclings. 

These poems, forever embarking on the commute between monster and human, paint for us the hypervisibility and interior awe that accompany a trans femme’s movement through urban landscapes. Despite being rooted in Baltimore and Brooklyn, there is an unmistakable pull towards the botanical and the cosmic. These poems take us upwards and outwards, coiling and opening with a kaleidoscopic preference for synergy, oceania, and beauty. There is a persistent vulnerability which accumulates & allows the text to arrive upon a new speaker, one who knows herself & says, "here is who i am. i am. i am."

Adolescence, Secondhand by Francisco Delgado

In Adolescence, Secondhand, houses burn and firecrackers pop while children navigate the ever-present violences that float within their lives. Both stumbling and sure, Delgado's narrator Chris strives to reconcile a cultural menagerie of TV shows and wrestling heroes with the blurred reality of friendship, family, and self.

These stories are tightly crafted and quietly crushing: within them, we join Chris and bear witness to a multitude of griefs, and the joys hidden and discovered in their core.

Things That Cannot Be Tamed by Khristian Mecom

Things That Cannot Be Tamed documents three generations of women as they survive, struggle, and thrive in a harsh and beautiful Alaskan landscape. These stories wonder and interrogate — does the place you’re from intrinsically define you? Or is that a choice you make?

In these stories, love and survival circle each other sharply within a landscape of the fantastic and magical — Mecom welcomes us to her hearth and illuminates truths believed in the bones.

Dislocate by Simone Person

Dislocate explores the things that force our bodies and selves out of space in time, navigating breakups, sleepovers, and the banality of a dinner party. Simone Person’s prose is both haunting and hilarious, her characters ever grasping for something real, the love they seek as elusive as clouds of smoke.

This book questions: what happens to us when we want to exist in the world, but can’t?

The Bitter Map by Crystal Boson

The Bitter Map is a restless arc of poems, collecting rituals, warnings, and survival stories. These poems hope to offer guidance to Black and queer folks on how to survive in hostile landscapes, and draw up religious, cultural and land memory maps to help them find a way back home. The Bitter Map is a tale of forced migration and a collection of the necessary stories along the way. This book will lead you to the gospel in the soil, just beneath the surface.

Oracle: A Cosmology by Destiny Hemphill

Oracle: A Cosmology explores lineage and family narrative by meditating on questions of loss, haunting, resistance, and personal & communal liberation. Entangling narratives of women who have been honed by hardship, this chapbook exists as an archive of intimate kin history. Destiny confesses, yes, i still remember how it feels to be / under the swollen tongue of a god’s gaping mouth. This cosmology is one for the people, and the people, they are ethereal.

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