Becoming Persephone

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“Ye gods it was not meant to be like this.” Mary Ann Honaker’s searing narratives show that resisting convention, as a young woman, does not liberate you from men’s cruelties. “You cannot cut time/like a fishing line/let the past drift downstream,” she writes. Still, the book’s later poems, redemptive and illuminated, insist that “This body is not a coffin.” In this moving journey, we experience the descent, but we return to the world and its sensual affirmations. This is a book that needed to be written. It needs to be read. – J.D. Scrimgeour, author of Lifting the Turtle and The Last Miles

Becoming Persephone is an accomplished debut of raw narratives which confront drug and alcohol use, teenage angst, violence, and rape. Throughout this collection, Honaker doesn't look away but rather into these experiences. These poems do what all excellent writing seeks to do; they find words for "the nighttime pouring out" of us. It is because Honaker authenticates this dark quotidian that she is also able to transcend it. Honaker prepares us all "To sit on the lip of a rowboat/and dry out what's needed/for flight." --Eileen Cleary, author of Child Ward of the Commonwealth

The fingerprints of the unflinching poems in Mary Ann Honaker’s Becoming Persephone will not soon fade away. These poems are rife with gothic power chords and break into all the gender dispensaries, stealing “boots stirruped by bullets,” “lopsided sobs,” and the “smashed glamour” of damned hands. Like the oracular smoke from the crack in the earth at Delphi, the subterranean damage in this book is equal parts intoxicating and terrifying. --Simeon Berry, author of Ampersand Revisited and Monograph