The cover of this book totally pulled me in, how could it not?.
Coffin Honey is a collection of poetry that is eye opening and completely raw.
This book is not about the beauty of nature but the damage humans are doing to nature and each other eg.climate change, hunting, destruction and extinction.
It paints a haunting picture that unsettles and opens your eyes and therefore I expect achieves it's objective. The writing was thoughtful & well crafted.
My thanks go to Netgalley, the publisher and author for this arc in return for a honest review.

I sadly didn't get a chance to download and read this before it was archived. I will be picking up a copy as soon as I can because I really wanted to read this. Also, I really love the cover and that's what originally drew me to this book.

This was a fantastic collection of poetry. It wasn't my usual type of poetry that I go for. However, I could really feel the passion of the authors words. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this collection of poetry. I really do love poetry that evoke emotional responses while I read it and this one did just that. I just loved how the poems where targeted at different type of emotions throughout. I was actually disappointed that it ended I was that engrossed in reading it and enjoying it that much. I really appreciate the authors style of writing and enjoyed the variance of lengths to the poems. I recommend this book to all those who love emotion provoked poems. I loved the poems that were so shocking that it sure was unexpected and I sure felt the punch it provides. As poetry is always very personal to each and every reader, please to try a same of this authors poetry as im sure you will thoroughly enjoy it . 

South praisegoes to the author and publishers for producing this extremely thought provoking collection of poetry. 

The above review has already been placed on goodreads, waterstones, Google books, Barnes&noble, kobo, amazon UK where found and my blog https://ladyreading365.wixsite.com/website/post/coffin-honey-by-todd-davis-michigan-state-univercity-press-4-stars either under my name or ladyreading365 or lady Reading365 or ladyc reading

Coffin Honey was a stunning, emotional collection of poetry that will resonate with me for a long time. The greater themes of advocacy for the environment tie in with the emotional intensity of the human experience. Impactful and beautiful.

A raw and sometimes uncomfortable collection of poetry meant to shock and nudge readers towards social change for the good of our planet and ourselves.

Coffin Honey, by Todd Davis, casts a grittily stark, clear-eyed, and hyper-attentive gaze on both the natural and the human world, capturing their moments of beauty and wonder, but also unflinching in their depiction of the violence that plays out both within and between them, whether the predator-prey relationship plays out with a bear and a young deer, a rapist and his young victim, or, more generally and widely, the way humanity preys on the world entire. As such, while it can be beautiful, it is not an easy or comfortable read.

The collection has a stronger sense of unity than many poetry collections, with characters (the boy, the girl) recurring throughout, the great bear Ursus wandering through many a poem, and a series of same-titled poems — “Dream Elevator” threaded amongst the other works. In some ways, therefore, it reads almost like a narrative, and repeated readings will further this sense.

The writing, especially its descriptions of nature, is always vivid and precise, often less the stereotypical poet’s eye and more the almost clinical eye of a scientist-observer, a taxidermist, a botanist. Davis is not simply an observer of nature in these poems but a participant in nature, with sharply detailed references to hunting and fly-fishing for instance. It's a wild kind of nature, untamed, though one under constant assault by humanity via climate change, pesticides, drones, etc. No area seems safe from our depredations.

Within this natural world lives a hard-scrabble humanity, miners and farmers whose lives are full of pain — the loss of limbs in machinery (“Johnny’s ring finger lost to a cultivator. Aunt Susan’s big toe to a potato planter. Last fall a combine gobbled Grandpa Harry’s leg from the knee down”), sexual assault, cutting, grieving the dead (even the bear). But also simply living their day to day lives: “Downstairs her mom cooks eggs and deer steaks, pours coffee in the bottom of a cup clouded with milk and sugar” (I cannot tell line breaks in my Kindle version frustratingly). Often, as at the end of this line, there is a sweetness that plays off against surrounding violence. In this poem, it’s the girl’s memory of her cutting herself with a razor and later the shooting of a deer. In another poem, the victim of assault recalls “when his uncle touched him in the cellar as he shoveled coal for winter, telling him he couldn’t have the fried doughnuts sprinkled with confectioner’s sugar if he screamed or told his mother.”

As noted, not an easy collection at times. I confess I wasn’t a huge fan on a first reading. The style was a bit more prose-y than I prefer, the sound-play more muted, the eye too detached. But it grew on me with subsequent readings until I found myself immersed in it, seeing it in a new light, and thinking how I will enjoy it all the more on, yet another read. Give Coffin Honey some time, and you’ll find it a rewarding venture.

I’ve read a lot of poetry throughout my lifetime, and this set is certainly on the darker side, which I suppose is entirely the point! Be warned: the content is not for everyone and may be difficult for some to read. Coffin Honey is a strange and, quite honestly, stomach-turning collection of poems. It is dark and examines the horrors of nature, death, and humans in an odd, weirdly poetic way. I’m oddly satisfied with it. Five stars.

Note: Thank you to Netgalley & publishers for allowing me access to this arc in exchange for an honest review! Please note that all opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own.

First time reading this writer, but I will definitely read more. Good writing and even though the content of the poems was harsh, that's what nature is sometimes. And the clash between humanity and the natural world is definitely not peaceful.

This is really not my cup of tea.
I could not get into it because of the odd writing and the constant hunting and animals dying references.

I received an advance reader copy of this book to read in exchange for an honest review via netgalley and the publishers.

Coffin Honey is a very raw, eye opening and stomach churning collection of poetry. I struggled with parts of this book - not because the poetry wasn't good as it was wonderfully written - it was the hard reality of the book that I struggled with. This book is not about the beauty and comfort of nature its more about the damage we are doing to the world as humans, hunting, climate change, death, destruction and extinction. These poems were at times hard to read due to the vivid imagery they conjured into my mind. But, I think this is what the poet aimed for - to bring a shock value to the table and remind us what is happening across the world daily.

POETRY AND VERSE

As I continue to dive into poetry, lead only by an uneducated poetry brain and my well-tuned cover gut, it's amazing how often I hit on work I connect with, in whole or in large part. I say this not because of any lack of "worthwhile" poetry, but the exact opposite problem - we are surrounded by a heavenly wealth of authors of all backgrounds writing fantastic things.

The problem is, as always, mine. Poetry is the hardest thing for me to read. I would guess it is one of the harder forms to write. So I don't always get the connections or see/understand the symbolism. But I also rarely pick up a collection that doesn't teach me SOMETHING. Maybe if I collect enough golden nuggets my reading ability will be honed. A girl can dream. The three titles in this post ran the gamut in form and substance and also hit the spectrum of how much I could connect.


Me (Moth), Amber McBride

I had not heard of this work when a trusted book friend went nuts over it and highly recommended it to me. It was my first read of 2022 and all I can say is "WOW." Starting the year with your socks blown off is pretty fantastic.

Two summers ago our car broke in half like a candy bar on the freeway & we all spilled onto the pavement as crumbled as sticky caramel-peanut filling.

Black teenager Moth lost her entire nuclear family in a bad accident. Who is she now, without her family to define her? Where she previously found solace in dance, to do so now feels too joyful and greedy. Moth is struggling with her identity and grief, feeling alone and uprooted. One day she meets a Navajo boy named Sani, from a differently-fractured family but also struggling with depression and uprootedness.

Sani and Moth set out on a road trip out West, technically to his father's home on the reservation, but in reality a zigzagging tour to find themselves and save the other. McBride's verse is gold that shines so brightly you need to sit with eyes shut and reflect on it. She sucks you in and grabs your guts and twists the story into something that both breaks your heart and fixes you. For grades 8 and up, this book is and should be for everyone. I don't do ratings, but this one gets every star in the universe.


I Must Belong Somewhere,
Dawn Lanuza

Every once in a while she is convinced that she doesn't belong here anymore.Yet she doesn't know where she should be just yet. She finds herself where she is because she doesn't know where else to be.
These first lines in the second piece very much hit home (or someplace home is waiting) for me. A lovely yet inquiring collection that deals with themes of longing, loneliness, home, exploration, suicide (and living with someone who is suicidal - "I've never read your suicide letters. I've lived with them instead."), surviving v. living, and various other branches that spring from these thoughts. From a few lines to a page, each packs a personal, thoughtful wallop.

Beautifully done, I highly recommend this collection for anyone who wonders or searches for SOMETHING - love, connection, meaning. The end of the piece quoted above is where I felt the poems connected, even though it's the second in order:

Sometimes, when she's in a new place, wandering and learning its streets, she just hears herself sighing, I must belong somewhere.She hasn't found it yet, but she hasn't given up on the idea of it.


Coffin Honey, Todd Davis

This cover is a work of art and I could not turn away. I also assumed (which is much of the cover gut operation) this collection would be steeped in nature, which it was. It was also a collection that, while quite patently excellent, was over my head a bit. Even when I don't "get" poetry, there are always lines/passages that resonate, oftentimes quite deeply. This bit, for example, about virus-ridden deer victims of the automobile:
The pastor of grief and dreams waves them into the road, a suicidal gospel written on warm macadam.

Davis's nature is not all about beauty, and he writes the brutal side, human and animal, with prose that is lovely but doesn't mask the horror. A hunt, pedophilia, lynching, death, racism, immigration, man's destruction of the natural world--all laid bare without apology for the monsters we can be.

[W]ithout any shame, we construct machines that make a mountain disappear, no regard for the memory or souls of trees.
* * *
White men stole black bodies to chain below deck, the only light seeping in where chinking failed. Unlike them, Ursus learned to share the one soul the world gives freely.

If only men could see the beauty without museums, the dismemberment, the displays of paws, claws and eyes outside of sockets, bodies stuffed and set on wired legs, caricatures of the real thing.

Thank you so much to NetGalley for providing me with an arc in exchange for an honest review. "Coffin Honey" is a spectacular poetry collection by Todd Davis. The writing style is descriptive and incredibly graphic, it immerses you and connects you with the poems. I find the emphasis on nature and the execution truly fascinating, it is unapologetic, raw and absolutely realistic to the point that it takes your breath away. The imagery is incredibly frightened of how evocative the poems are, With all this being said, it is important to mention that this poetry collection does not focus on the peaceful and graceful part of nature. The focal point is the gruesome impact humans have on nature. While more poetry on subjects like hunting, extinction, climate change, etc., truly is needed, the way these poems were written made me genuinely scared. Apart from that, the only drawback i saw was the repetitiveness, which at times made the poems heavier than they were already. While this book is truly intriguing, I suggest reading a couple of reviews and making yourself familiar with the trigger warnings before reading it.

Not at all what I expected, though it lives up to the title and cover image: there are certainly bears, and despite a persistent nature theme, the tone skews pitch black, often veering into the macabre. No soothing reflections on flowing water to be found here. The nature in <em>Coffin Honey</em> is harsh, violent, frequently repulsive. The opening poem culminates with intoxicated teens aiming a pickup truck at a deer's carcass, literally aiming to make its (and your) head explode. The tone never softens and only gets worse from there. Fair warning: there are multiple poems about rape and child abuse, with some horrific details I can't wash out my mind. Not exactly light reading!

It really is a strange book. Almost entirely narrative poetry, sometimes structured as prose poetry, sometimes with tight line breaks, it's not as lyrical or imagistic as what I usually look for in poems (enjoyment of poetry being almost entirely subjective, those are my biases). Instead it reads as a series of stern-voiced vignettes, often linked by recurring themes and characters--most notably Ursus, who functions alternately as ur-bear and something of a stand-in for the personification of the natural world facing annihilation at the hands of man. We frequently shift perspective from human eyes to those of Ursus and others, and the personification and anthropomorphosis can be a bit jarring. Since it's never all that abstract, the narrative focus means it's easy to tear through the book, for the most part. But it's the poet's penchant for graphic details (spoiler>e.g., a pedophile washing himself in a cold stream, contemplating castration, before being ripped apart by a bear</spoiler>) that makes me want to set the book face down from time to time. (Figuratively speaking, that is: I got a free digital copy from Netgalley in exchange for a review, so here's your disclaimer.) I read plenty of horror and have no issue with violence in context, but the tone and language here can feel a bit overwrought. It's not really the same thing, but I kept thinking of the pitch-black morbidity of early Cormac McCarthy (think <em>Child of God</em>) that could almost tip into parody if it weren't so consistently bleak.

Setting aside my expectations for more traditional nature poetry, I'll admit there's an almost apocalyptic thrum running through the whole collection. A primitive pulse that registers as rising madness, some kind of blood corruption reflecting back our global sickness, or a prayer for extinction. Read in that light, I think the collection mostly succeeds on its own terms, but go in with both eyes open.

Todd Davis is the author of five full-length collections of poetry: Winterkill (2016), In the Kingdom of the Ditch (2013), The Least of These (2010), Some Heaven (2007), and Ripe (2002); as well as of a limited edition chapbook, Household of Water, Moon, and Snow: The Thoreau Poems (2010). He edited the nonfiction collection, Fast Break to Line Break: Poets on the Art of Basketball (2012), and coedited the anthology Making Poems (2010). Davis is a fellow in the Black Earth Institute and teaches environmental studies, creative writing, and American literature at Pennsylvania State University’s Altoona College. His newest collection is Coffin Honey.
In Coffin Honey, Davis explores themes of violence and how people hurt each other. The book is broken into sections, each one reading like a short story told in narrative poems, which makes for some haunting connections between the poems. For example, the first section contains the poem “Taxidermy: Cathartes Aura” with lines like:
The bird’s spiraling descent
was unexpected, like when
his uncle touched him
in the cellar as he shoveled
coal for winter, telling him
he couldn’t have the fried
doughnuts sprinkled
with confectioner’s sugar
if he screamed
or told his mother.
Davis is tapping into some very real horrors in this collection, which makes for evocative and troubling poetry that lingers for the reader long after the book is closed.
These sections are separated by poems titled “dream elevator,” which touch back on some of the characters Davis has explored in the section. These add a mythic element to the book, as the boy in this section descends into
a tunnel

into vanishing

mountains

shaken

folded

with past sins
The form of this poem, as well as the mythic imagery, works well to capture the nightmarish aspects of these narratives and really serves to haunt the readers.
There are other elements of myth throughout, such as in the eponymous poem “Coffin Honey,” which has lines like
The beekeeper raises a bee-box lid

scrapes bodies

from comb, wax filling

behind fingernails

embalmed

in stickiness.
Here Davis is tapping into Greek and Egyptian mythology and folklore and using ancient symbols of death and passing to add layered nuance to his poems about human suffering and sorrow.
Overall, this is a moving collection of poetry. Todd Davis is able to connect with readers on a visceral level, exposing humanity’s capability for great harm to each other and the world. It’s a haunting book of very real horrors as well as mythic horrors, all in an accessible poetic style. This is a strongly recommended collection that any fan of poetry or horror poetry will want to read.

Unapologetic and unflinching, Coffin Honey is the first collection of poems by Todd Davis that I've read, and I think I will need to look into his other collections because this? This is beautiful.

There are several layers to each poem in this collection, and the meaning for each changes depending on how you read them. Admittedly, due to my lack of familiarity with specific historical events, figures, and such, some of the poems that contained references and allusions to the aforementioned went over my head. Thus, what I understand of those poems is probably far from what the poet originally intended. Nevertheless, I still enjoyed the observations of nature and humans.

One aspect that I really liked are the characters. Many of them aren't limited to a singular poem and together, they added another layer of cohesion to this collection. This makes it more of a story with different perspectives than just a collection of poems. Another would be the gorgeous imagery. It's breathtakingly vivid and at times, haunting. I spent so much time reading this collection, going over and over the same lines just to take in deeper the beauty and intensity of the imagery. The way violence is juxtaposed with serenity, life with death, nature with man-made—it's done so well that the impact these poems have becomes greater.

However, despite my love for the powerful contrasts the poems here have, I must also admit that the ones that touch on nature and man-made things can be too jarring. Certain poems also have a strong feeling of clinical detachment, if not for the entirety of the poem, then for parts of it. There are also ones that have a flow (when reading) that isn't as smooth as expected. Perhaps these are intentional, but for me, they made for an awkward read.

Everything considered, Coffin Honey is a must-read for those who prefer their poems more visceral and cutting. This collection is one of instinct, survival and violence. You won't find significant joy or tranquility from the pieces here.

A selection of poems about the violence people do to one another as well as to the natural history. Trigger warnings abound, and so much heartbreak and hardship can be difficult to read, but Davis is a strong poet and makes the reader question why we continue in this way.

Todd Davis writes with haunting and memorable imagery. A poet that is new to me, but artful and enjoyable.

I don't know how to feel about this one. The writing is beautiful in itself, and some of the poems made me go "wow that was a good collection of words" , but it didn't make me feel anything. Most of the time I also didn't know if there was a meaning behind the words that I didn't catch, or if it was simply observations of nature. There's no rule for how to write poetry or anything else, but this didn't really leave its mark on me

I’ve struggled with writing a review for this book, and even more with giving it a star rating. I wasn’t aware of the author, but learning he was a poet with an emphasis on the natural world made me check the local libraries to see if any of his earlier books were available before I received this one. Now that I’ve read this one, I’m not interested in reading the others. I had to brace myself to reread this one, which made me appreciate it more while still not enjoying it.

This is a highly praised and talented writer, and it’s great to see someone featuring nature in almost every poem. But if you’re looking for the joy or peace or strength that I turn to nature for, you won’t find it here. This is the nature of hunting and agriculture and dominance, red in tooth and claw, whether describing a young girl shooting a deer, a snapping turtle taking a gosling and a girl’s revenge, or a bear eating a fawn; of climate change and extinction.

I’m no optimist with rose-colored glasses or someone who thinks art must be positive or characters likable—I side with the non-humans and grieve their extinction and the destruction of natural areas, think the collapse of this civilization is both near and necessary, and I like post-apocalyptic fiction and the poetry of Robinson Jeffers, but this is unrelentingly grim stuff, a reflection of our current situation which we need to ignore a bit to make it through each day. Reading this book, I felt like a penitent practicing self-flagellation.

The near-constant tone makes the poems predictable—when children wade into part of a creek they’ve been told to avoid, or a bear climbs into a hollow tree, you know what’s going to happen. Even the few positive moments seem to carry darkness. The first poem includes deliberately driving over the heads of dead deer and concludes “and the darkness in our dreams grows darker.” Throw in sexual abuse of a child. One of my favorite poems includes a woman with tattoos of extinct birds. Most of these poems were previously published individually, and I wonder if I may have appreciated each of them more that way without the cumulative effect of taking a beating. The final poem does bring the book to a lovely conclusion.