Requeening

Arare feat for any book of poems, let alone a debut, in that the lines, wrought with such deft precision and care, mark the sum total of a life richly lived and felt at the seat of poetry...These poems care, first and foremost, for what they write of and through, which is a much neededyet increasingly rareachievement. -- Ocean VuongEngaging the matriarchal structure of the beehive, Amanda Moore explores the various roles a woman plays in the family, the home, and the world at large. Beyond the productivity and excess, the sweetness and sting,Requeeningbrings together poems of motherhood and daughterhood, an evolving relationship of care and tending, responsibility and joy, dependence and deep love.The poems that anchor this collection dont shy away from the inevitability of a hives collapse and consider the succession of requeening a hive as a new heart ready to be fed and broken and fed again. The collapse is both physicalthere are poems of illness and recoveryand emotional, as the mother-daughter relationship shifts, the daughter becoming separate, whole, and poised to displace. The liminal spaces these poems traverse in human relationships is echoed in a range of poetic and hybrid form, offering freedom and stricture as they contemplate the way we hold one another in love and grief.Requeeningis a vivid and surprising collection of poems from a winner of the National Poetry Series Open Competition.