Review “I fell into a mood of abnormal mental acuteness reading this beautiful book. In poems about her girlhood in Cuba, the agonies of parenting, even the ordinary life of a dog, Boyers combines a kind of bridal innocence with the whiteness of the dead. Honey with Tobacco takes us back, like taste and smell, to the place where memory—pungent and sweet and acrid—tries to provide the key to everything.” -- Henri Cole“Peg Boyers’s poems have a rare power: they match the private to the public, the intimate to the political. Her own memorable phrase puts it best: ‘spiky but benign.’ The range is formidable. From lyric desolation to ‘funky irreverence.’ But unifying this diversity, we hear, unmistakably, the voice of a true poet.” —George Steiner ― George Steiner"The final stanza exquisitely elaborates one approach to poetry, as an activity both impassioned and arduous, drawing on both the intellect and emotional experience. This ethos, consistent with the collection as a whole, provides a fitting conclusion to this well-wrought, highly original book." -- Carrie Etter ― Warwick Review Product Description Pietà This time the migraine came with a visionbathed in night sweat:I was sitting on the Eames chair,your man’s body on my lap, legs and arms white as casein draped over mine, spilling onto the cassock, new soreson your legs, dried bloodon your feet and hands,from your chalk mouththe words forgive me,from mine, the impossibleno Hard Bread,Peg Boyers’s debut poetry collection, with verse spoken in the imagined voice of the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg, was widely praised for its inspired ventriloquism and its brilliant lyricism. In Honey with Tobacco, Boyers’s own intensely personal voice emerges in three strikingly distinctive variants. The first part of the book is the most explicitly autobiographical, bringing together poems that explore the poet’s Cuban American experience and a childhood marked by travel, the tropics, and varieties of disenchantme