Maybe the Sweet Honey Pours (Hardcover)

Author: Paolo Javier

Publisher: Nion Editions (2018)

Evolving from a libretto for performance with Listening Center originally commissioned by the High Line, Maybe the Sweet Honey Pours is made up of new poems that fold into a longer work drafted across several train rides from NYC to Toronto, Canada. Its present form resembles the seriality of Ted Berrigan, Frances Chung, Lorine Niedecker, and Stephen Jonas' poems. Overtly, Maybe the Sweet Honey Pours is a love poem about hitting the re-set button, and rhapsodizing about Wong Kar Wai's Happy Together while mourning the loss of musical icons David Bowie, Phife Dawg, and Prince. But still-present (North American) border anxieties, racial melancholia, transnational identity, fatherhood, and Buddhist teachings number among the poem's spectral affections.