Honeyfish by Lauren K. Alleyne
New Issues Press, 2018
Lauren K. Alleyne, island-born poet and immigrant to the United States, displays a magisterial voice in her astounding collection, Honeyfish. This fusillade of protests, elegies, and odes embraces the full range of emotion as Alleyne mourns injustice, celebrates individuality, wades in nostalgia, and rejoices in embodiment. Her language glitters with rich metaphor, maintaining a consistency of image and theme while engaging a broad spectrum of experience. Throughout this collection, Alleyne invokes the power of remembrance. With a remarkable absence of malice, the poet protests police, racial, and sexual injustice through her gentle work of imaging the innocent. Alongside these protests, Alleyne gifts us the tenderness of her reflections on family and belonging in the context of emigration.
Honeyfish is divided into three untitled sections, the first of which is composed largely of elegies for victims of racial injustice. Alleyne is careful to name those she laments, honoring their unique personhood. She elegizes Trayvon Martin (“Poetry Workshop After the Verdict,” “Post-Verdict Renga”), Tamir Rice (“Play,” and in section III, “Elegy”), each victim of the Charleston Shootings (“Grace: A Lamentation”), Sandra Annette Bland (“Heaven?”), and others. In the act of naming, Alleyne fully recognizes each of the lives whose loss she mourns, drawing them from the dehumanizing generalization of “racial violence” into the light of individuality.
In section II, Alleyne reflects on family and all its implications, opening with “Ode to My Parents” and “Inventing a Lineage on the Day My Mother’s Mother Is Buried.” A major theme of this section is that of self-actualization as an emigrant from the family and culture of the speaker’s youth to the speaker’s relocated present. A native of Trinidad and Tobago currently living in Virginia, Alleyne works through the emotional and literal journey of the emigrant. In poems like “When Daughters Drown Their Fathers” and “After 18 Years, the Immigrant Goes to Therapy,” Alleyne hints that embracing the new may not necessarily imply the discarding of the old. A surprising feature of this section is Alleyne’s inclusion of poems on issues of sexual violence and misogyny, such as “She Who Wears Horns and Weeps” and “The Manager’s Tips for Working at the San Francisco Restaurant and Bar.” Alleyne’s authoritative voice undermines the male gaze and its grasping attempts at dominance. The presence of these poems in the section mainly concerned with family suggests that the speaker’s strong connection to her family has much to do with her resolute autonomy, assertiveness, and indignance at being undervalued by insecure, selfish men.
The last section of Honeyfish is an extended ars poetica with themes of nostalgia and the pursuit of belonging (“Red Pilgrimage,” “Home in the Key of Absence”). With repeated images of ocean and wind, Alleyne takes the reader through the fear and self-discovery of the hero’s (and poet’s) journey, culminating in the final poem, “Reading among the Ruins.” Revisiting her elegiac tone from earlier sections, Alleyne leaves the reader with a double sense of grief and wonder.
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Hope Fischbach is an emerging writer and poet. She has published poetry reviews and author interviews in Cleaver Magazine and Speaking of Marvels, and her own poetry and flash fiction appear in Lee Review and 30 North. A South Carolina native, she studies English and Spanish at Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee.