Requeening audiobook

The speaker of Amanda Moore’s collection is fully realized and unflinchingly honest: a woman who, in meditating on the natural world, motherhood, and mortality, embodies our raptures, griefs, and frailties. The collection’s first poem, “Opening the Hive” is a particularly fine introduction to themes its speaker will explore, as it concludes “Like late afternoon sunlight, a kiss/on my dented forehead, mother collapsed and emptied// of poison, barbed stinger, and the baby, the jelly, the bee.” In varied forms including sonnet and haibun, poems in Requeening celebrate life’s richness and depth, the poet’s skill everywhere in evidence. Don’t miss reading this wonderful collection!

Requeening journeys beautifully into the life of the poet/speaker: places she lived in, marriage, watching her child grow from birth to teenage years, illness, a beloved's passing (my favorite sequence). If the collection were a sonata the bees would be the dazzling and multi-voiced accompaniment to the speaker's melody, making it ring with depth and breadth. They not only permeate the collection as recurring image but also as a concrete presence in their own right.

Vivid, painful and poignant with moments of pure sweetness.

"the sands her entrythe messy recordmy grandmother keeps: a family in objects. All the things and none of their stories: the deedswe did to get them, what we keptand what we stole, this past we’ve made from pilfered dust."A collection that goes all the way to the horizon and down into the earth. Poems ruminating on family, ancestry, life. Moore traces the relationships of women, though birth, sickness, and death, relationships with mothers, daughters, grandmothers, and long-distant, unmet aunts. Through long, winding poems she showcases the blood and the joys and the agonies of motherhood. I enjoyed how the poems lept around from birth to toddler to teenager, then back again to nursing. Moore expertly, with vivid, brutal details, exposes the rawness of being a mother, of practically losing your own body. She captures seemingly small moments of one's life and teases out the thoughts lurking underneath. There are hints of her love and her marriage, but this collection is mostly surrounding female relationships: it could be expressed as an ancestry of motherhood. I enjoyed the framing of bees and honey.  It reminded me of THE HONEY MONTH but with an earthier, more in-this-world feel. "I hate how I sound when I say things like “Yeah, I keep bees in my backyard,”or “Yeah, I surf most mornings,”“Yeah, I’m a poet,”as if I’m any good at any of it. I don’t really know what I’m doing most days. I just like to touch fear."

Magical. Vivid, precise language and description convey emotional truths that are nuanced, unpredictable, and weighty. There's gravitas as well as playfulness in the daring and varied choices the poet makes. Loved it.

Fair knowledge: I received an uncorrected proof of Requeening: Poems by Amanda Moore in a Goodreads giveaway. Amanda Moore takes the theme of beekeeping and weaves it into poems about a woman's life. I particularly like her poems about the relationship of a mother and daughter. There are also a number of poems about cancer and dying which affected me profoundly because my own mother died from cancer and because I had my own battle with breast cancer a number of years ago. Thanking God for healing me! Unconnected to either of those themes, the poem, "Sonnet While Killing a Chicken," made be both smile and grimace.I have read many types of books including poetry, but one word was new to me: Haibun. I had to look it up. "The haibun is the combination of two poems: a prose poem and haiku. The form was popularized by the 17th century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho." (Source: https://www.writersdigest.com/write-b...)

REQUEENING, a poetry collection that centers on the roles of women, takes an interesting look at womanhood by tying together the structure of a beehive and what happens when a hive must adjust to a new Queen. I thought this collection was quite different from other works I’ve read that touches on similar topics and there were several poems that really resonated with me.I thought the most powerful poems were the ones centered on a woman’s role as a mother and the difficult dynamics women experience with their daughters as they grow up. I also found Moore’s poems where she discussed her cancer diagnosis to also be incredibly powerful.All together this collection was really special to read. There were a few poems early on that did not resonate as much with me, but I thought the second half was really well done.

The hour of possibility a house where I want to live…This is simply one of the most probing books of poetry I’ve read. So beautiful. Its theme on bees and hives and queens touches on the deep connection between mother and daughter, a rich and painful record of a relationship scored by the most commonplace rhythms of our everyday home life. I recognize the travails and triumphs as those of my wife and daughter, and therefore my own, too. I will write more later, but I wanted to respond with the full heart I feel in the journey that Amanda Moore took me on.

Very moving. Moore’s shift from shorter lines to full paragraphs is intriguing, and I thoroughly enjoyed the collection.Favorite lines:“I don’t really know what I’m doing most days. I just like to touch fear.”“All of the things/and none of the stories: the deeds/we did to get them, what we kept/and what we stole, this past/we’ve made from pilfered dust.”“We are not a people/of songs and stories”

At least one affectionate "fuck" per page because fuck that's good stuff. Ruined my life in the best way, will be recommending to everyone I meet. Mother-daughter dynamics from perspective of being both a mother and a daughter. The daughter poems had me sobbing. The mother poems made me feel what it is to be a mother, as someone who is not a mother. And bees. What more could I possibly ask for?

I enjoyed this book! It is one of the more straightforward collections of poetry out there, the language clean and precise, heartfelt and insightful. A book I would quickly recommend to non-poets, to people interested in poetry about motherhood, daughterhood, marriage, about growing old and sick and recovering or not. About bees, yes, though tangentially. A lovely read.

Such a nuanced and beautifully written collection. One of the best poetry books I've read in a way. I loved the Maple Ave poem, Aunt Annie's Sand, Foraging, A Place, Asleep, Sweet and Fitting Haiban, and others.

I met a oncology nurse recently that said whenever a patient who is a mother starts chemo, she gives them a copy of this book. Truly so beautiful

One of the best poetry collections I've read in years! Full of complex, intricate lines and with a collection-level structure that is constantly surprising. Everyone should be reading this book!