As you tuck into Amal El_Mohtar's The Honey Month, I would recommend having at the ready a big plate of warm crusty bread oozing butter and a few jars of honey with spoons at the ready. Yes, it will make you that hungry, that desirous of the sticky, glorious stuff. Honey is one of those mythical foods -- celebrated in almost every culture for its potency, its golden sweetness as well as its amber bitterness. It is rubbed on the tongues of newborns to give them a good life, the faces of brides to make them fertile, and the hands of the dead to reward them in the afterlife. It is alchemy at its best -- fragrant and edible.
So it is great fun to read Amal's salute to the glorious stuff in sensual, dreamy works of mythic poetry and short fiction. Scent and taste evoke emotions, memories, longings and each honey is introduced with its appropriate synesthesic qualities: Thistle honey has both "crispness and mellowness at once...playful, a child among honeys," while garnet red Blackberry Creamed Honey has the scent of "bread served at funerals." The literary responses to these sensory descriptions are steeped in the wax of fairy tale, romantic poetry, and memoir: a bee's stinger leads a dreamer to the lonely realm of a fallen star child; a wily lover seduces a young woman with proffered taste of peach cream honey; and a beloved childhood ring lost in the woods reappears a year later on the branches of a sapling.
This slim volume, published by Papaveria Press, is handsomely illustrated by Oliver Hunter who also provides much of the illustrations for Goblin Fruit, a quarterly online poetry journal edited by Amal and co-creator Jessica Wick.
