spuytenduyvil

Brenna Womer’s Honeypot gives us familiar literary forms—including pristine prose paragraphs, lyric strophes, and short fictions—only to dismantle them for feminist ends. Frequently engaging questions of language, agency, and the body, Womer’s formal innovations call into question normative assumptions about how narrative should or ought to behave, giving us instead a lyricism that “thrives in areas of disruption." By moving between moments of wholeness and provocative fragmentation, Womer begins work toward an alternative lexicon, one more hospitable to women’s voices. Here, she proves that a new line of inquiry demands new forms of discourse, ultimately creating—through her deft experimentation with received forms—a vehicle that fully does justice to the complexity of her thinking.  This is an astonishing debut.

       Kristina Marie Darling, author of Dark Horse: Poems & Look to Your Left:  A Feminist Poetics of Spectacle

 

Everything about Honeypot—including the title—is sensual, is tactile, is something you can roll over your tongue and under your nose and luxuriate in. Whether poetry, prose, or in-between; whether realism or something floating farther afield, Womer makes it so vivid and vital you can’t help but get caught completely in its web.

      Amber Sparks, author of The Unfinished World

 

Slipping easily from genre to genre and form to form, proudly saying the supposedly unsayable, refusing ever to balk in the name of imposed politeness or unfair expectation, Brenna Womer breaks all the rules except the most important one: to tell your own truth unswervingly, in the best way you know how, no matter what. This is a smart, brave first collection, brimming with beauty and empathy and joy.”

      Matt Bell, author of Scrapper