beeing

In Meryl Phair’s beeing, the sticky walls of language are pried open until its wild nectar trickles down the page. Letters waggle-dance across the white space like honeybees deep in conversation. Each poem is a map of movement and discovery and typographical art. “[W]e are all made of sun warmed clay / we are all walled gardens / waiting to spill out,” the poet says. In this sprawling, playful collection, her joyful explorations of personal identity are pollinated by her worries for our environmental future, which hum just under the surface of each poem. As Phair blooms more into herself, she has to come to terms with watching the Earth she loves crumble beneath her. But there’s still so much hope here in her words and the spaces between them. “[S]ome things need to break to heal correctly,” she tells us. In beeing, destruction makes room for rebirth and renewal—when we are forced to make beauty out of the ruins of our human hive, finding sweetness in the cracks.