"A rare feat for any book of poems, let alone a debut, in that the lines, wrought with such deft precision and care, mark the sum total of a life richly lived and felt at the seat of poetry...These poems care, first and foremost, for what they write of and through, which is a much needed-yet increasingly rare-achievement." -- Ocean Vuong
Engaging the matriarchal structure of the beehive, this collection of women's poetry explores the various roles a woman plays in the family, the home, and the world at large. Beyond the productivity and excess, the sweetness and sting, Requeening brings together poems of motherhood and daughterhood, an evolving relationship of care and tending, responsibility and joy, dependence and deep love.
The poems that anchor this memoir in verse don't shy away from the inevitability of a hive's collapse and consider the succession of "requeening" a hive as "a new heart ready to be fed and broken and fed again." The collapse is both physical-there are poems of illness and recovery-and emotional, as the mother-daughter relationship shifts, the daughter becoming separate, whole, and poised to displace. The liminal spaces these lyrical essays traverse in human relationships is echoed in a range of poetic and hybrid form, offering freedom and stricture as they contemplate the way we hold one another in love and grief.
Requeening is a vivid and surprising collection of poems from a winner of the National Poetry Series Open Competition.
This unflinching collection maps the heart of a family with:
- Mother Daughter Poems: Explore an evolving relationship of care and tending, responsibility and joy, as the daughter becomes separate, whole, and poised to displace.
- Poems About Illness and Recovery: Confronting the physical and emotional collapse of the hive with raw honesty through poems of diagnosis, treatment, and gratitude.
- Beekeeping as Metaphor: Engaging with the matriarchal structure of the beehive to explore a woman's roles, the sweetness and sting of domestic life, and the inevitability of a hive's collapse.
- National Poetry Series Winner: Discover the award-winning collection selected by Ocean Vuong, who praises its "deft precision and care."
"In her outstanding debut collection,
Requeening, Amanda Moore imaginatively parallels the life of a woman in her family with the life of the queen bee in the hive. These poems take us through the sleepless nights of early parenthood,
drunk with joy, through illness and recovery, through grief and fierce love. Often these poems evince a hard-earned dark humor. Just as she receives a cancer diagnosis, she writes,
My 9th graders file into our room/ and I am at the whim of divine irony/...just as I have to teach a lesson/ on Odysseus’ journey to the Underworld. Always her images are precise and vivid, her understanding cogent, as when she compares mourning to Monet’s paintings:
haystack, haystack, haystack...which is to say/ they are like this grief.../all the same but for the light. And when Moore describes the sand an Aunt collected from all over the world in a poem that ends,
what we kept/ and what we stole, this past/ we’ve made from pilfered dust, we feel she is speaking a truth about all of our lives."
