baby, sweetheart, honey (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781959118152)

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.

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 capture 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