baby, sweetheart, honey
baby, sweeetheart, honey is a poetry collection with a focus on the aggression against women and femmes, through a sexually fluid, sex worker's lens. Pieces touch on generational and religious trauma, mental health, addiction, woman on woman toxicity, the violent language and behavior of men (particularly cisgender heterosexual men) against women and femmes, eating disorders, and social performance. The work in this collection is explicit in its transparency and therefore some pieces are graphic and should be read with care.
baby, sweeetheart, honey is a poetry collection with a focus on the aggression against women and femmes, through a sexually fluid, sex worker's lens. Pieces touch on generational and religious trauma, mental health, addiction, woman on woman toxicity, the violent language and behavior of men (particularly cisgender heterosexual men) against women and femmes, eating disorders, and social performance. The work in this collection is explicit in its transparency and therefore some pieces are graphic and should be read with care.
baby, sweeetheart, honey is a poetry collection with a focus on the aggression against women and femmes, through a sexually fluid, sex worker's lens. Pieces touch on generational and religious trauma, mental health, addiction, woman on woman toxicity, the violent language and behavior of men (particularly cisgender heterosexual men) against women and femmes, eating disorders, and social performance. The work in this collection is explicit in its transparency and therefore some pieces are graphic and should be read with care.
“In unapologetic screams and whispers, Emily Perkovich in baby, sweetheart, honey delivers a provocative poetic memoir where a woman must maneuver through her own adolescent trauma so long unnamed, and into womanhood where desecration of the female body serves as mentor, traitor, and awakening. In the retellings of the violations committed against the female body, Perkovich achieves something greater than forgiveness—not in the saccharine way of forgetting or even redemption—but that there is a malleability, evolving adaptability, and unflinching epiphany of power that women ultimately possess even after what they suffer, tolerate, and defy time and time again. Perkovich spares no one from the uncensored weight of her story, which is not told in traditional linear narrative, but shatters long-held silences through a maze of a woman who fights her way to not just survive but ultimately live.”
—Elsa Valmidiano, author of We Are No Longer Babaylan
“In Emily Perkovich’s baby, sweetheart, honey, her poem “Girls, Girls, Girls” describes girls as “revolution” and “riot,” “predator” and “prey,” “silence” and “outcry,” and most of all, “protest.” Through poems centering the female body, sex, sexual assault, sex work, motherhood and more, Perkovich protests the limitations placed on women—and on anyone other than cis white men—in our society. With a variety of poetic forms, striking imagery and language, Perkovich breaks through these limitations to express the many realities of women in a world that so often condemns and restricts the female gender. Most of all, Perkovich takes us on a journey toward self-ownership—toward women refusing to be defined by others, instead choosing to name ourselves.”
—Stephanie Parent, author of Every Poem a Potion, Every Song a Spell
“To say Emily Perkovich’s baby, sweetheart, honey is brilliant, is an understatement. The collection is potent, at times unsettling, but an incredible read. Perkovich is such a master poet that her imagery is both soft and lurid. In the poem May Crowning she writes “I watched an orchid blossom beneath the hem of my skirt/ And I’ll tell you what/ It’s in the petals unfurling that I fall in love” So many of the powerful poems in the collection captures what it means to walk through the world as a woman; they do not shy away from gender politics and trauma. D&C & I’ll burn my own funeral pyre are haunting, while Girls, Girls, Girls is a battle cry. So many lines and poems that will stay with the reader long after they finish this ultimately empowering collection.”
—Marisa Silva-Dunbar, author of Allison and When Goddesses Wake