Grim Honey

The hardest sweet is sharp to the tongue painful cutting and often divine. The poems in Jessica Barksdales collection Grim Honey follow thin paths of grief up through steep switchbacks and down the rocky declines into the meadows where for a moment we can pause and remember before moving on. The speakers in these poems open to their sorrows and passions and then push forward into stories that-while understood-are still evolving. Barksdale moves through issues of family love and death delving into what is beautiful as completely as what is not to show the fullness of life.