Hive-Mind

by Suzette Marie Bishop

As if hexed, bees disappear like the lost crew of a ship. Hive-Mind illuminates the real source of Colony Collapse Disorder: our destructive approach to nature. Reading Suzette Bishop's collection of poems, we move through humming hives of lyric poems, swarms of prose, and then toward a diminishing collage of fragmentary, disconnected thoughts, the result of fried neurons. This hybrid collection sounds an alarm about what else disappears with the bees: pollination, female power and enterprise, jars of honey, the bee-loud glade, the human colony. Suzette Bishop highlights caretakers of honeybees who are the most acutely aware of bees as humankeepers. We meet three Nineteenth-Century Texas beekeepers and Sylvia Plath—women who kept themselves in comfort, awe, and inspiration while tending to their hives.

Finalist for Eric Hoffer Award in the poetry and book cover categories.

86 pages, Paperback

First published January 28, 2015

About the author

Suzette Bishop's first book of poetry, She Took Off Her Wings and Shoes, won the May Swenson Award. Her second book, Horse-Minded, was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer and Writers' League of Texas Awards. Her third book, Hive-Mind, was also a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award. In addition, she has published three chapbooks, Cold Knife Surgery, Jaguar's Book of the Dead, and, most recently, Eyes of Some Robbers. Her poems have appeared in many literary magazines and anthologies, including The Writing Disorder, Offcourse, Fugue, Borderlands, The Antioch Review, Imagination & Place: An Anthology, The Virago Book of Birth Poetry, and American Ghost: Poets on Life after Industry. Another poem was an Honorable Mention in the Pen 2 Paper State-Wide Creative Writing Contest sponsored by the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities. Additional poems won the Spoon River Poetry Review Editors’ Prize Contest and been finalists in the Northwind Writing Award and contests at Black Fox Literary Magazine and So to Speak. Two other poems have been nominated for the Pushcart and AWP Intro Journals Project Awards.

Reviews

[Fez Moreno · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very uniquely written poetry book. Very beautiful and would recommend to anyone. I'm so happy I am a owner of this book~ : )