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

RK Fauth (author)

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." These are poems in hindsight.

Playing with Bees positions poetry in hindsight to contemplate poetry's "natural" inclinations towards building alternative worlds through earthbound metaphors. Whether in a 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 changes about our imaginations 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. Playingwith Bees covets what's left. At the bottom of everything, we find the fragments an ecologically intact dream; an apocalypse in reverse.

About this title

About the Author

RK Fauth is a poet whose writing has appeared in POETRY, The Rising Phoenix Review, Blue Unicorn, Dream of the River: an LGBTQ+ Anthology, The Non Binary Review, The Fulbright Korea Infusion, and elsewhere. From 2019–2022, RK ran the award-winning public humanities project, "Unprecedented," which circulated Black Plague–era erasure poems between strangers. She earned an M.A. at Georgetown University, where she also served as a Poetry Fellow at the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice. RK lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, with her fiancé and their two dogs.

Edition details

• Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1682831965
• ISBN 13: 9781682831960
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 277