Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
A moving and celebratory poetry collection from Young People’s Poet Laureate and National Book Award Finalist Naomi Shihab Nye. This resonant volume explores the similarities we share with the people around us—family, friends, and complete strangers.
Honey. Beeswax. Pollinate. Hive. Colony. Work. Dance. Communicate. Industrious. Buzz. Sting. Cooperate.
Where would we be without honeybees? Where would we be without one another?
In eighty-two poems and paragraphs (including the renowned Gate A-4), Naomi Shihab Nye alights on the essentials of our time—our loved ones, our dense air, our wars, our memories, our planet—and leaves us feeling curiously sweeter and profoundly soothed.
Includes an introduction by the poet.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780063144651 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 03/15/2022 |
| Pages: | 176 |
| Sales rank: | 375,736 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.00(w) x 7.12(h) x (d) |
| Age Range: | 8 - 12 Years |
About the Author
Naomi Shihab Nye is the author and/or editor of more than thirty books. Her books of poetry for adults and young people include 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (a finalist for the National Book Award); A Maze Me: Poems for Girls; Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners; Honeybee (winner of the Arab American Book Award); Cast Away: Poems of Our Time (one of the Washington Post’s best books of 2020); Come with Me: Poems for a Journey; and Everything Comes Next: Collected and New Poems. Her other volumes of poetry include Red Suitcase; Words Under the Words; Fuel; Transfer; You & Yours; Mint Snowball; and The Tiny Journalist. Her collections of essays include Never in a Hurry and I’ll Ask You Three Times, Are You Okay?: Tales of Driving and Being Driven.
Naomi Shihab Nye has edited nine acclaimed poetry anthologies, including This Same Sky: Poems from Around the World; The Space Between Our Footsteps: Poems from the Middle East; Time You Let Me In: 25 Poets Under 25; and What Have You Lost? Her picture books include Sitti’s Secrets, illustrated by Nancy Carpenter, and her acclaimed fiction includes Habibi; The Turtle of Oman (winner of the Middle East Book Award) and its sequel, The Turtle of Michigan (honorable mention for the Arab American Book Award).
Naomi Shihab Nye has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow (Library of Congress). She has received a Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, four Pushcart Prizes, the Robert Creeley Award, and "The Betty," from Poets House, for service to poetry, and numerous honors for her children’s literature, including two Jane Addams Children’s Book Awards. In 2011 Nye won the Golden Rose Award given by the New England Poetry Club, the oldest poetry-reading series in the country. Her work has been presented on National Public Radio on A Prairie Home Companion and The Writer’s Almanac. She has been featured on two PBS poetry specials, including The Language of Life with Bill Moyers, and she also appeared on NOW with Bill Moyers. She has been affiliated with the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin for twenty years and served as poetry editor at the Texas Observer for twenty years. In 2019–20 she was the poetry editor for the New York Times Magazine. She is Chancellor Emeritus for the Academy of American Poets and laureate of the 2013 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature, and in 2017 the American Library Association presented Naomi Shihab Nye with the 2018 May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture Award. In 2018 the Texas Institute of Letters named her the winner of the Lon Tinkle Award for Lifetime Achievement. She was named the 2019–21 Young People's Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. In 2020 she was awarded the Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement by the National Book Critics Circle. In 2021 she was voted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Naomi Shihab Nye is professor of creative writing-poetry at Texas State University.
Read an Excerpt
Honeybee
Poems & Short Prose
Chapter One
Your Buddy Is Typing
Your buddy in the early hours. Your buddy with the scratchy throat who didn’t sleep well. On the other side of the earth he is rising, making a single cup of coffee, sitting down at a small wooden table. Your buddy who hasn’t shaved in weeks. Your buddy in Nuevo Laredo missing the old days the easy crossings of borders the wanderings in streets without fear. Your buddy who doesn’t want to see any bullets is typing a letter he will not sign. Your buddy with the aching wrist. Your buddy with high hopes watching sun come up over calm water thinking, we’ll make it, maybe. Your buddy who sends 17 letters in 14 days. A surge of random observations but nothing is random. No one alone. The bold buddy and the shy one with a closet of stacked pages. The young buddy whose grandfather the great writer has been hiding for years. Your buddy in Japan who wishes your heart to feel like a primrose. Your buddy in Glasgow eating a radish as he types in golden light. Your buddy in a head scarf begging for sense. Your buddy in a sari who bosses the men. Your buddy who types with three fingers like you do. Your buddy in Australia your weary buddy in the airport lounge your buddy in the village library your buddy in the wireless hotel room where even the rod under the clothes lights up your buddy on the brink your buddy who was reminded what words could do after he swore they could do nothing anymore your buddy in Bethlehem who wonders if anyone listens your buddy who is feeling weak your buddy who tells what is really going on behind the scenes your buddy who refuses to back down yourlost buddy who won’t speak to you punishing you for reasons unknown even she must be typing to someone else by now, trust in this as you say good-bye give it up, typing will help you get through it no matter where you are when the restaurants close and the little shops you loved bolt their doors for the last time and the artist you wish you’d known better dies suddenly, you grip the memory of minor messages sent back and forth only months ago. Who else should you be typing to right now? Who else is on the way out? All of us. Everyone typing in the late and early in the far reaches in the remote unknowns in the heart of the diagnosis near the fishing huts with Catch of the Day signs the names of fish scrawled on blackboards by the whispering sea.
HoneybeeSomeone You Will Not Meet
Rolls her socks into balls,
lines them in a shoebox.Sharpens a yellow pencil
carefully checking the point.There used to be plenty of pencils.
Stares into a mirror thinking fat nose, fat nose.
Pins a green bow to her head, plucks it off again.
Worries about loud noises.
Wraps presents in the same crumpled paper
over and over again for members
of her own family.Gives her brother an orange because
he likes them more than she does.He complains, I am sick of this life.
She fusses at him, Don’t say that.Gives her mother a handwritten booklet
made of folded papers called
One Apartment.The people she loves most are in it.
The uncles who come and go are in it.
Lucky ducks.
They are afraid every time they go
but they brave it.A few cats and plants and rugs are in it,
square television set with a scrappy picture,and the streams of bees swooping
to the jasmine vine
right outside the window.They dip into blossoms and fly away.
Never could she have imagined being jealous
of a bee.She listens to the radio say there will be
more fighting
though no one she knows likes fighting.Does anyone feel happy after fighting?
It’s a mystery.
She chews on a sesame cookie
very very slowly.Staring at the sesame seeds
she could almost give them
names.
Poems & Short Prose. Copyright (c) by Naomi Nye . Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
Table of Contents
Honeybee 1
Introduction 1
Your Buddy Is Typing 11
Someone You Will Not Meet 13
A Stone So Big You Could Live In It 16
Museum 17
For My Desk 22
Communication Skills 24
The United States Is Not The World 26
Taverne du Passage 27
Wee Path 28
Password 30
The Frogs Did Not Forget 32
Missing It 33
The Crickets Welcome Me to Japan 35
Ted Kooser Is My President 36
How We Talk About It 37
Culture of Life 39
Missing Thomas Jefferson 41
Don't Say 44
Running Egret 45
Lion Park 46
The Little Bun of Hours 48
Pollen 51
Honeybees Drinking 53
Weird Hurt 56
We Are the People 58
Help with Your Homework 62
Busy Bee Takes a Break 64
Bees Were Better 66
Invisible 68
Girls, Girls 70
What Happened to the Air 72
Slump 75
Deputies Raid Bexar Cockfight 77
Accuracy 79
This Is Not a Dog Urinal 81
Argument 82
There Was No Wind 84
Companions 85
For a Hermit 86
Letters My Prez Is Not Sending 89
Broken 92
The Cost 94
Friendly Postal Clerk, Saturday Morning 96
While You Were Out 97
Driving to Abilene in the Pouring Rain 98
Cinnamon Twist 99
Sunday 103
We Are Not Nothing 105
Our Best Selves 106
The Dirtiest 4-Letter Word 108
RSVP 109
Boathouse 110
The Problem of Muchness 112
How Do I Know When a Poem is Finished? 113
Excuse Me But 115
Bears 117
Pacify 118
To One Now Grown 120
Watch Your Language 121
Cat Plate 122
Click 124
Hibernate 125
My President Went 130
Texas Swing Low 132
From an Island 134
The White Cat 135
Ducks in Couples 137
Campaigning Door to Door 138
Parents of Murdered Palestinian Boy Donate His Organs to Israelis 140
Before I Read The Kite Runner 142
The First Time I Was Old 143
Useless 144
Jonathan's Kiwi Cake 145
Consolation 146
For Rudolf Staffel 147
Hot Stone Massage 149
Regular Days 150
Last Day of School 151
Young Drummer Leaving Alamo Music Company 158
The Room in Which We Are Every Age at Once 160
Gate A-4 162
