Format: paperback
Published: January 2022
ISBN: 978-1-946482-62-4

Chloe Honum is the author of The Tulip-Flame, selected by Tracy K. Smith for the Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Prize and named a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award, and the chapbook Then Winter. She is the recipient of Pushcart Prize, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and a Grimshaw Sargeson Fellowship. Raised in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand, she is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Baylor University.

“The Lantern Room is devastating and sublime. I found myself reading it in one heart-stopped sitting, holding the light out for both Honum and myself. I have not stopped reading it since that day. If the present moment is the only real home any of us ever have, Honum is teaching me how to daringly live there. Now, and now. And now.”

—Rebecca Gayle Howell, The Common

“A poet of startling figuration and generosity, Chloe Honum offers readers a window into a lush-intricate inner world reflected in tactile experiences of landscape, weather, and yearning.”

—Sara Ellen Fowler, Rhino Poetry

“From the beginning I have loved and sought out Chloe Honum’s poems, craving their spareness and intensity, their assuredness of style and depth of feeling. ‘I would side with winter,’ the speaker of one poem claims, and it’s true: these poems possess and enact an arctic beauty. The hard-edged language of her lines and her sumptuous descriptions immerse us in a world that is so finely rendered and atmospheric at the same time.”

—Richie Hofmann

“The Lantern Room is stunning and harrowing, built of poems that interrogate the wound of grief, the wound of love, and insist on asking an impossible question. As Honum writes, ‘The light is slippery. Everything hums. It is so important to go on naming’; it is this slipperiness— with language, mood, memory, desire—that keeps us a little off-kilter as we feel our way through the tenuous intensities of sorrow and beauty, sometimes dreamy and sometimes despairing and also, despite it all, sometimes shimmering— ‘O cold, dicey blooms’— with hopefulness.”

—Allison Titus

“The Lantern Room begins with a speaker who might be ‘the translator’ of the ‘ancient, mottled language’ of an angel, and from that beginning onward reads as if it had been written toward achieving the language of angels. These poems foreground lyricism in such a way as to make meaning seem a natural outgrowth of music—they are, as a consequence, some of the most purely lyric poems I’ve read in years. Reading them, I at times wondered how Honum dared to write them, to brave such music. But I am so grateful she did.”

—Shane McCrae

“In The Lantern Room, her exquisite new collection, Chloe Honum moves, as her poems do, with range, precision, and astonishing beauty. Honum’s speaker travels across Arkansas motel to motel, missing a beloved, and in the book’s crown jewel, ‘The Common Room,’ chronicles an out-patient hospitalization in a psychiatric ward. The collection closes with sublime meditations on the speaker’s mother’s death: ‘How will I live without her?’ How, indeed. This book is that survival, and more than that, an extraordinary mind pressing through language to speak so deeply, so startlingly, the reader is made larger to receive its enormous gift: ‘But I have rain in my hair. This much is true. Let me bring it to you.’”

—Allison Benis White

“Rife with radiant conceits and brisk realism… memorable and rich.” —Publishers Weekly

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0.25 lbs

6 x 8 in

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