The Tulip-Flame
Chloe Honum, Associate Professor of English
Finalist for the 2015 PEN Center USA Literary Award in Poetry
Winner of the 2015 Eric Hoffer Book Award in Poetry
Winner of Foreword Review’s 2014 Book of the Year Award
Winner of the 2014 Best First Book of Poetry Award from the Texas Institute of Letters
Chloe Honum is the author of The Tulip-Flame, selected by Tracy K. Smith as winner of the 2013 Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry, and The Southern Review, among other journals, and have been anthologized in Best New Poets 2008 and 2010. A recipient of a 2009 Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, Honum has also received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Kerouac House of Orlando, and the Djerassi Artists Program. She was born in Santa Monica, California, and was raised in Auckland, New Zealand.
Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2014
ISBN 9780986025754
“Chloe Honum’s brilliant first book The Tulip-Flame traces an identity forming within radically divergent but interlocking systems: a family traumatized by the mother’s suicide, a failed relationship, the practice of ballet, a garden—each strict, exacting. And with ‘a crow’s sky-knowing mind,’ Honum in every case transfigures emotion by way of elegant language and formal restraint. Chloe Honum is ‘one astounding flame’ of a poet, and I predict a long-lasting one.” —Claudia Emerson
“I am so very taken by the exquisite power and grace in every single one of these poems, so arresting in their honesty and in their unflinching ability to scour the world for image after indelible image.” —Tracy K. Smith
“Chloe Honum’s first book is stark and haunting and hard to put down. I read it in one straight blaze like a novel, then found myself living in its glimmers for weeks.” —Christian Wiman
"Graceful and quiet, Honum’s stunning debut moves like a ballet dancer: light and deliberate, even when in pain. Here, pain takes center stage, laid bare in the opening poem: 'Mother tried to take her life.' … Despite the long shadow death casts, the book bursts with new growth, where 'Out of the light’s loose skin/ trumpet-flowers formed.' To Honum, perhaps nature’s presence is evidence enough that we haven’t been left alone: 'Tonight, it crosses my mind/ how gone you are, and stars,/ if stars say anything, say Otherwise.'" —Publisher's Weekly, starred review
"No phrase is wasted, no emotion unexplored." —The Weekly Standard
"The book promises the values Elizabeth Bishop exalted in poetry: accuracy, spontaneity, and mystery...The Tulip-Flame represents an exciting moment for contemporary poetry." —Los Angeles Review of Books
"[Honum's] emotional register is as powerful and lithe as a leaping dancer." —Huffington Post