A Dream in Which I Am Playing with Bees: Poems (Walt McDonald First-Book Series in Poetry) - Hardcover

Fauth, RK

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1682831965 ISBN 13: 9781682831960

Publisher: Texas Tech University Press, 2024

Synopsis

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.”

Playing with Bees positions poetry in hindsight to contemplate poetry’s “natural” inclinations toward building alternative worlds through earthbound metaphors. Whether a single 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 in our imagination changes 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. Playing with Bees covets what’s left. At the bottom of everything, we find the fragments of an ecologically intact dream: an apocalypse in reverse.

About this title

About the Author

RK Fauth earned a master's degree in English from Georgetown University, where she also served as a Lannan Poetry Fellow. Her writing has appeared in POETRY magazine, Poem-a-Day, West Trade Review, The Decadent Review, AGNI literary magazine, and elsewhere. Fauth has held fellowships and distinctions from the Fulbright Program, the Alpine Fellowship Foundation, the Lannan Foundation for Poetics and Social Practice, and the Academy of American Poets. She currently lives in Asheville, North Carolina.

Edition details

• Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1682831965
• ISBN 13: 9781682831960
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 87