Honey Mine

It's poetry stretched over mountains of prose, mythic and dirty like a genius's sex diary told outta the side of their mouth in a torn bathrobe with a topical map on the back that includes genitals, wisdom & lore. It's held together by love - lost & known. And the healing power of silence. Honey Mine is one hell of a unique book. It's a study. It disrupts the category, be it literature, fiction, the essay or the lesbian. It says: whatever you have the nerve to do, I will also do. Honey Mine is an inspirational work. -Eileen Myles This is a huge book; it belongs in the cannon of the best queer writers. To read Honey Mine is to be inhabited by the largesse of the word lesbian, body, sex, sexuality. And by a lesbian aesthetic of human relations, bookended by the author's magnificent enduring love with her late partner Angie. These fictions, in resisting...before the theorems arrive... teleological primness, parade language nimble enough to absorb class, cities, memory, grief, shame, without sacrificing a cornucopia of pleasures. Like a tarte tatin, Honey Mine spills over with deliciousness. My tactic vis a vis narrative, says Camille Roy, is really just to bring abandonment into the relationship. She succeeds marvellously. -Gail Scott From Camille Roy's work, I have learned literal worlds; frog-kicked through summers in musty, abandoned cabins, tread the concrete divisions of Chicago's South Side. In this expansive, formally promiscuous collection, 'stories don't work.' Fiction and fantasy function not as creative effacements of the brute facts of queer life, but as the very means by which that life innovates itself-as relational, as fickle, as an ongoing 'survival of self.' Gauntlet of girlhood ideology, love letter peeled open like a garlic clove. Honey Mine takes apart the toolbox of narrative mechanisms; the aberrant languages and intimacies we use to scrape, mould and manipulate one another. Never bowing to romanticism and yet unmistakable in its communion, this is a book that has, in many ways, seeded and re-made me. I am so grateful for it. -Trisha Low Imagine a forest floating in the air. Camille Roy does this. She is a writer who lets her reader dream, past tree-line. -Bhanu Kapil The experience of reading [her] reminds me of a winding amusement park ride, as I momentarily suspend judgment and normative modes of sense-making to take in the strange and mercurial scenery, a kind of wild and gritty fantastic realism I must absorb since I have chosen to be physically strapped to my seat, or in the world of this book, handcuffed. -Lauren Russell, The Volta Lauren Levin's first collection, 2016's The Braid, remains one of the richest, strongest poetry collections of the decade. -Jay Aquinas Thompson, Full Stop Levin brings cultural theory and visual rhetoric to bear on lingering questions about oppression, power, and social justice in this innovative collection. -Publishers Weekly