Honeycomb: Poems

The poems in Carol Frost's latest collection explore the poet's experience of her mother's struggle with Alzheimer's disease with unflinching sincerity and courage. Using the disappearance of bees as her prevailing metaphoric backdrop, Frost subtly probes the varied emotions occasioned by her mother's slow deterioration, crafting a deeply moving meditation on memory and its role in the creation of identity and relationships. Though profoundly elegiac, a deep sense of humanity is always palpable in Frost's imaginative leaps between natural and spiritual worlds. Honeycomb is a work of unmistakable beauty and extraordinary detail, filled, in the words of one poem, with "the humble sense of being alive."

"This beautiful and challenging book is filled with the intensely evocative imagery Frost fans have come to expect, but it's her concern with our attempts to make sense of our experience---of our lives and our deaths---that creates the urgency driving these poems. Is it possible to face both our mortality and our unlovely decline head on?"---Iowa Review

"Frost remains a poet too little discussed and far too little celebrated, but for many readers who know her mature work she is indispensable...The Queen's Desertion shares with Frost's recent books a formal and intelectual boldness, and it contains what is certainly her most linguistically virtuosic work."---Boston Review

Carol Frost is the author of ten previous collections of poems, including The Queen's Desertion, I Will Say Beauty, and Love and Scorn from Northwestern University Press. She has received National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and PEN and Pushcart awards, and she has been honored by the Elliston and the Poets' Prize committees. She holds the Theodore Bruce and Barbara Lawrence Alfond Chair of English at Rollins College, where she directs the Winter with the Writers Literary Festival.