• Skip to main content
  • Skip to main navigation
Baylor University
English
College of Arts & Sciences
  • About Us
    • Contact Us
    • Beall Poetry Festival
    • English Major Career Possibilities
    • Partnerships
    • Study Abroad
  • Undergraduate
    • First-Year Writing
    • Literature
      • Courses Offered
      • Degree Plan
    • Linguistics
      • Career Possibilities
      • Courses Offered
      • Degree Plan
      • Resources
    • Professional Writing & Rhetoric
      • Courses Offered
      • Degree Plan
      • Internships
    • Creative Writing Minor
    • Scholarships
    • Student Awards
      • Past Winners
  • Graduate
    • M.A. Policies and Procedures
    • Ph.D. Policies and Procedures
    • Certificate in Literature & Religion
    • English Graduate Student Association (EGSA)
    • Graduate Opportunities
      • Past Winners
    • Graduate Travel Funding
  • Faculty
    • Publications
      • Literacy in a Long Blues Note
      • Modernity, Community, and Place in Brian Friel's Drama
      • A Fire to Light Our Tongues
      • Hollow Palaces
      • Haunted Property
      • American Literary Cultures
      • Sacred Rhetorical Education in 19th Century America
      • Modernism in the Green
      • A Long, Long Way
      • Hope and Aesthetic Utility in Modernist Literature
      • The Courage to See
      • The Evil Twins of American Television
      • Harvest Bells
      • Letters of a Long Name
      • Constructing Nineteenth-Century Religion
      • Reforming Women
      • Thomas Hoccleve
      • Mark Twain Under Fire
      • Building Natures
      • Understanding Marilynne Robinson
      • Living with the Living Dead
      • The Life Group
      • Then Winter
      • Building Jerusalem
      • The Divine Face in Four Writers
      • Seamus Heaney: An Introduction
      • Imagined Spiritual Communities in Britain's Age of Print
      • Housework and Gender in American Television
      • The Boke of the Cyte of Ladyes
      • Entertaining Judgment
      • Seamus Heaney's Regions
      • Elegy on Kinderklavier
      • Tracing Southern Storytelling in Black and White
      • Mapping Christian Rhetorics
      • The Tulip-Flame
      • The Glyph and the Gramophone
      • The Prodigal
      • Beyond the Pulpit
      • The Reconstruction of Mark Twain
      • Sylvia Plath's Fiction
  • Organizations
    • 19CRS
    • 20CRS
    • House of Poetry
    • Linguistics Club
    • Literary Society
    • MRRS
    • Professional Writing & Rhetoric Organization
    • Sigma Tau Delta
    • The Phoenix Literary Magazine
  • University Writing Center
  • Make a Gift
Baylor BU English Faculty Publications The Tulip-Flame
  • Publications
    • Literacy in a Long Blues Note
    • Modernity, Community, and Place in Brian Friel's Drama
    • A Fire to Light Our Tongues
    • Hollow Palaces
    • Haunted Property
    • American Literary Cultures
    • Sacred Rhetorical Education in 19th Century America
    • Modernism in the Green
    • A Long, Long Way
    • Hope and Aesthetic Utility in Modernist Literature
    • The Courage to See
    • The Evil Twins of American Television
    • Harvest Bells
    • Letters of a Long Name
    • Constructing Nineteenth-Century Religion
    • Reforming Women
    • Thomas Hoccleve
    • Mark Twain Under Fire
    • Building Natures
    • Understanding Marilynne Robinson
    • Living with the Living Dead
    • The Life Group
    • Then Winter
    • Building Jerusalem
    • The Divine Face in Four Writers
    • Seamus Heaney: An Introduction
    • Imagined Spiritual Communities in Britain's Age of Print
    • Housework and Gender in American Television
    • The Boke of the Cyte of Ladyes
    • Entertaining Judgment
    • Seamus Heaney's Regions
    • Elegy on Kinderklavier
    • Tracing Southern Storytelling in Black and White
    • Mapping Christian Rhetorics
    • The Tulip-Flame
    • The Glyph and the Gramophone
    • The Prodigal
    • Beyond the Pulpit
    • The Reconstruction of Mark Twain
    • Sylvia Plath's Fiction

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 

English

College of Arts & Sciences

Carroll Science 106

Department of English
One Bear Place, #97404
Waco, TX 76798-7404

(254) 710-1768
Apply Now
Make a Gift
Contact Us
Location
Baylor BU English Faculty Publications The Tulip-Flame
  • About Us
    Back
    • Contact Us
    • Beall Poetry Festival
    • English Major Career Possibilities
    • Partnerships
    • Study Abroad
  • Undergraduate
    Back
    • First-Year Writing
    • Literature
      Back
      • Courses Offered
      • Degree Plan
    • Linguistics
      Back
      • Career Possibilities
      • Courses Offered
      • Degree Plan
      • Resources
    • Professional Writing & Rhetoric
      Back
      • Courses Offered
      • Degree Plan
      • Internships
    • Creative Writing Minor
    • Scholarships
    • Student Awards
      Back
      • Past Winners
  • Graduate
    Back
    • M.A. Policies and Procedures
    • Ph.D. Policies and Procedures
    • Certificate in Literature & Religion
    • English Graduate Student Association (EGSA)
    • Graduate Opportunities
      Back
      • Past Winners
    • Graduate Travel Funding
  • Faculty
    Back
    • Publications
      Back
      • Literacy in a Long Blues Note
      • Modernity, Community, and Place in Brian Friel's Drama
      • A Fire to Light Our Tongues
      • Hollow Palaces
      • Haunted Property
      • American Literary Cultures
      • Sacred Rhetorical Education in 19th Century America
      • Modernism in the Green
      • A Long, Long Way
      • Hope and Aesthetic Utility in Modernist Literature
      • The Courage to See
      • The Evil Twins of American Television
      • Harvest Bells
      • Letters of a Long Name
      • Constructing Nineteenth-Century Religion
      • Reforming Women
      • Thomas Hoccleve
      • Mark Twain Under Fire
      • Building Natures
      • Understanding Marilynne Robinson
      • Living with the Living Dead
      • The Life Group
      • Then Winter
      • Building Jerusalem
      • The Divine Face in Four Writers
      • Seamus Heaney: An Introduction
      • Imagined Spiritual Communities in Britain's Age of Print
      • Housework and Gender in American Television
      • The Boke of the Cyte of Ladyes
      • Entertaining Judgment
      • Seamus Heaney's Regions
      • Elegy on Kinderklavier
      • Tracing Southern Storytelling in Black and White
      • Mapping Christian Rhetorics
      • The Tulip-Flame
      • The Glyph and the Gramophone
      • The Prodigal
      • Beyond the Pulpit
      • The Reconstruction of Mark Twain
      • Sylvia Plath's Fiction
  • Organizations
    Back
    • 19CRS
    • 20CRS
    • House of Poetry
    • Linguistics Club
    • Literary Society
    • MRRS
    • Professional Writing & Rhetoric Organization
    • Sigma Tau Delta
    • The Phoenix Literary Magazine
  • University Writing Center
  • Make a Gift
  • General Information
  • Academics & Research
  • Administration
  • Admissions
  • Gateways for ...
  • About Baylor
  • Athletics
  • Ask Baylor
  • Bookstore
  • Calendar
  • Campus Map
  • Directory
  • Give Light
  • Give to Baylor
  • Illuminate
  • News
  • Pro Futuris
  • Search
  • Social Media
  • Baylor Libraries
  • College of Arts & Sciences
  • Diana R. Garland School of Social Work
  • George W. Truett Theological Seminary
  • Graduate School
  • Hankamer School of Business
  • Honors College
  • Law School
  • Louise Herrington School of Nursing
  • Research at Baylor University
  • Robbins College of Health and Human Sciences
  • School of Education
  • School of Engineering & Computer Science
  • School of Music
  • More Academics
  • Athletics
  • Human Resources
  • Marketing and Communications
  • Office of General Counsel
  • Office of the President
  • Office of the Provost
  • Operations, Finance & Administration
  • Senior Administration
  • Student Life
  • University Advancement
  • Undergraduate Admissions
  • goBAYLOR
  • Graduate Admissions
  • Baylor Law School Admissions
  • Social Work Graduate Programs
  • George W. Truett Theological Seminary Admissions
  • Online Graduate Professional Education
  • Virtual Tour
  • Visit Campus
  • Alumni & Friends
  • Faculty & Staff
  • Online Graduate Professional Education
  • Parents
  • Prospective Faculty & Staff
  • Prospective Students
  • Students
  • Accessibility
  • Anonymous Reporting
  • Annual Fire Safety and Security Notice
  • Digital Privacy
  • Legal Disclosures
  • Mental Health Resources
  • Report It
  • Title IX
 
Baylor University
Copyright © Baylor® University. All rights reserved.
Baylor University • Waco, Texas 76798 • 1-800-229-5678