This Is the Honey

December 1, 2023
Poet and children's author Alexander writes, "So much of the time, Black writers are expected to write about the woe." This vital, alternative, in-the-now anthology is "a gathering space for Black poets to honor and celebrate. To be romantic and provocative. To be unburdened and bodacious." The book's title is from a poem by Mahogany L. Browne: "Soil creates things // Art births change // This is the honey // & doesn't it taste like a promise?" Sweet and steely poems offer fresh, witty, and hard-hitting perspectives on ancestors and children, nature's bounty, resistance, love, beauty, voting for Obama, and the taking down of the Confederate flag. More than 100 living poets of different generations are represented here, including Chris Abani, Tara Betts, Nikky Finney, Ruth Forman, Nikki Giovanni, Amanda Gorman, and Evie Shockley. The evocative thematic sections include "The Language of Joy," "Race Rage Raise: The Blackened Alphabet," and "When I See the Stars: Praise Poems," which celebrates such luminaries as Bessie Coleman, Nina Simone, John Lewis, and Chadwick Boseman. An electrifying collection for poetry lovers and poetry newbies.

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Starred review from December 22, 2023

Poet Alexander's (Why Fathers Cry at Night) anthology gathers an astonishing abundance of voices, introducing new poets and also offering a rich gathering of celebrated and familiar voices, beginning with Nikki Giovanni's exhilarating and deliciously wild revelry about travelling to Mars. Readers will also find poems by Rita Dove, Elizabeth Alexander, Nikki Grimes, Ross Gay, Marilyn Nelson, Yusef Komunyakaa, Jason Reynolds, and Natasha Tretheway, among others. The poems are organized thematically (joy, love, origin, race, resistance, praise) and make for rich browsing. Alexander's introduction to the volume makes it clear he doesn't want to pigeonhole Black writers but instead to celebrate the scope and individuality of their work. He refers to this book as an "unbridled selfie," and here that term seems not self-indulgent or ridiculous but necessary and even thrilling. VERDICT This amazing anthology may be the most important poetry collection of this decade. It is a book for poetry lovers, a book for the curious, a book of comfort, a book of prayer, a book of passion and a book of joy, a book of sorrow and a book of desire, but in the end, it is simply and wondrously a grand and glorious book.--Herman Sutter

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Starred review from February 19, 2024
This essential anthology, edited by poet and YA author Alexander (Why Fathers Cry at Night), includes work by more than 100 living Black poets, from Elizabeth Acevedo to Rita Dove. In his introduction, Alexander centers joy and wonder as guiding principles behind his selections, describing the anthology as “a gathering space for Black poets to honor and celebrate. To be romantic and provocative. To be unburdened and bodacious.” Indeed, joy permeates the poems, from Tony Medina’s ebullient “Black Boys,” in which he writes, “Black boys be bouquets of tanka/ Bunched up like flowers,” to Tyree Daye’s “Inheritance,” a meditation on what connects people to their forebears: “My mother will leave me her mother’s deep-black/ cast-iron skillet someday,/ I will fry okra in it,/ weigh my whole life on its black handle,/ lift it up to feel a people in my hand.” Xan Forest Phillips’s “Want Could Kill Me” explores desire and intimacy: “I want to buy you/ a cobalt velvet couch/ all your haters’ teeth/ strung up like pearls/ ...but my pockets/ are filled with/ lint and love alone.” Featuring a refreshing mix of established and emerging voices, this vital volume showcases a thriving and multifaceted poetic tradition.