Once Honeysuckle

In Once Honeysuckle, Kit Zak provides us with the music of graceful aging, those haunting melodies that are laden with grief and hurt, redemption and joy. These are poems of survival and more, of loving what’s been lost and what remains, of appreciation for the cruel beauties of the human. With a clear eye and a careful ear, Zak brings a world where a “name echoes in oak leave” and “Balls of ice form and still they cling. / Tenacious as mother love,” and we are invited to walk in it. —Gerry LaFemina Kit Zak sculpts every poem over and over until it is rich with sound and meaning. She never shies away from what most people cannot say. And she brings in each piece a tenderness that shows what a poet wants to show: a care of words and the world. In Kit’s work, the audience sees what a woman who is a mother, a daughter, an educator, and an activist, sees. In “Yes I Said Yes I Said Yes,” “I’ll not limp along,” and to know that line is to know what fearless and original poet Kit Zak is. —Ethan Joella, author of Where Dads Go (Finishing Line Press) Zak’s poetry dances through this chapbook with the grace of eddying leaves and the longing of almost held memories. The imagescape seamlessly slips from the corner of the reader’s eye into full focus—each sure thing surrounded by a constant wavering, a buzzing, a susurrus of sounds across generations. Zak is a master of time’s concurrence, of how our past is never really our past, but the only present we ever have. —John A. Nieves, author of Curio