No Honey For Wild Beasts

Systems of the Lower Midwest No Honey for Wild Beasts is an anthem, heart song, lamentation, and freedom cry. In skillfully wrought, passionate, and searingly honest poems, Alba Cruz-Hacker explores the exaltations of women's experiences, as well as exposing their darker depths. As a woman 'straddling' several cultures, she confronts the painful legacies of colonial rule and racism. She also pays homage to the struggles of disempowered individuals in China, the Middle East, and elsewhere, who fight for equality, justice, and humane treatment. Though she perceives herself as a "hybrid," Cruz-Hacker is truly a borderless Everywoman, a poet extending Walt Whitman's democratized vision and Derek Walcott's moral compass and lush Caribbean lyricism. With her rage and outrage, tenderness and vulnerability, devastating insight and luminous mythologizing, her presence in contemporary letters is one we need like a life raft. Her poetry takes us to unchartered territory, to islands of turbulent discovery and ultimate recovery. Maurya Simon, author of Ghost Orchid and Speaking in Tongues Alba Cruz-Hacker writes with a fierce aesthetic and a compassionate engagement with the world. The journey these poems invite you on is necessary and compelling. Chris Abani, author of Kalakuta Republic and Song For Night