SPEED READING: Honeysuckle & Nightshade / Brennan DeFrisco
Honeysuckle & Nightshade
Brennan DeFrisco
Hella Poetry / Swimming With Elephants
Review by
Lauren Parker
Welcome to Speed Reading, our fast, occasionally flippant, review column where we attempt to spread the love of a recent new release in a very short amount of time. We’ll take the time to find some incredible books, you spend your time reading some incredible books.
So, what’s Honeysuckle & NIghtshade about?
Honeysuckle & Nightshade is about the complex and comforting sensation of want. More than just desire, more than just pining, more than just contentment, DeFrisco’s first full length poetry collection weaves the sticky thoroughness of love, heartache, and devotion.
And, who’s the author?
Brennan DeFrisco.
What’s their deal?
DiFresco is an accomplished slam poet and writing instructor. A National Poetry Slam finalist, a voice actor, and he even officiates weddings.
What’s a single reason to read Honeysuckle & Nightshade?
Because you have over salted your dinner and you need a story to tell yourself when you eat it anyways
What are a couple more reasons to read Honeysuckle & Nightshade?
Honeysuckle & Nightshade combines some of DiFrisco’s most warm and gentle work with odes to wondrous and wild women, and never looks away from the depth of any feeling. Like an unbroken gaze, DeFrisco explores family, love, lust, memory, and magic.
If you’re a fan of these books, you should give Honeysuckle & Nightshade a chance:
Hexenhaus by Sarah Nichols
Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie by Joshua Harmon
Ruin by Cara Hoffman
Folk Medicine by DC Jarvis
A small taste of Honeysuckle & Nightshade:
& if the room spins
We keep each other safe from the dark
We turn hand into hair tie when whiskey decides to leave
We become leaning towers, balance each other out
& if we fall
We will not remember the bruise, only the company
The gentle tension of hands as you help me up,
Telling me, I got you
A little more from Lauren Parker:
I realize that these reviews are intended to be short, but I’ve never cared much for rules. They’re fine for some, of course, but there’s no shine or utility in something if it makes you be different from your true self in the wrong sorts of ways. Rules tend to make me want to be different in all the wrong ways. I like books and talking about books and writing about books and writing books and I need exactly as many words as I want.
But in reality, more than just reviewing work, more than just reading work, and more than just promoting work, all of which are very important things, artists create to make people feel things.
So here we go.
The first time I remember being at the ocean, I was eight, and greasy with the sunscreen that will probably be found to give us all cancer or be sixty percent crisco, and the sun had never looked so bright. I had seen the sun peak through shady trees, beat down on the lawn in the summer in my New Jersey lawn, or vanish entirely to let the fireflies do their worst. The sun seemed to move to best highlight the wide and deep blue water that stretched into the sky. The salt of the air left deposits on my cheekbones and the corners of my mouth, and for the entire day I was on the brink of tears because at some point we would have to go home, every sob exhaled as laughter as I ran down the beach. I held my breath as we loaded our towels and sandy pails and shovels into my mother’s white station wagon, trying to hold as much of the air in my lungs as long as possible. I hoped my hair would never dry. I hoped we would come back. I hoped I would love something as much as this again.
DeFrisco made me feel that.
