Year of the Murder Hornet
Catalogue, essay, lament, Year of the Murder Hornet, Tina Cane’s new poetry collection, is a work born of tension. Juxtaposing the personal and the political, these poems navigate the uneasy terrain of the self amid an increasingly tumultuous and fragmented world. Taking up the poet’s mantle as seeker, Cane interrogates and wrestles with notions of personal narrative, theory, and truth, as well as our collective cultural realities. Year of the Murder Hornet is a book of this moment meant for all moments.
PRAISE FOR YEAR OF THE MURDER HORNET
In this fierce and enthralling book, Tina Cane records a time of pandemic and climate change, regimes and threats, murder hornets and dying seas, quarantine baking and leaf-blower protests, stimulus payments and food chains, gentrification and apps, conspiracies and personal theories, doom-scrolling and Great Conjunctions, fake narratives and disposable masks—and of sheltering in place when poetry is the only solace: the “iambic in the darkness.” Love is “a process of education” and memory “is a poet,” she tells us, making new paths for us to understand this painful time. With boldness and grace, Cane negotiates a tense present, a distressing future, and the wish for a “perfect past” tense. Her poems create a moving map so that we don’t struggle alone in our “personal weather” and remind us that we are also able to be “overpowered by flowering magnolias.”
—Camille Guthrie, author of Diamonds
We have, all of us, in recent years wandered into a spectacle, into some new, albeit strangely familiar, theater of cruelty. What rules of conduct can we possibly affirm? With genuine courage and in fierce measures, Tina Cane establishes a rule of heart and of vivid allegiances which I truly believe to be not only valid but redemptive. Year of the Murder Hornet, for all its ferocity, is a book of virtues and humane understanding. Here is poetry both urgent and durable.
—Donald Revell
ABOUT THE POET
Tina Cane is the author of the poetry collections Year of the Murder Hornet (Veliz Books 2022), Body of Work (Veliz Books, 2019), and Once More with Feeling (Veliz Books, 2017). She has also published the chapbooks Dear Elena: Letters for Elena Ferrante (Skillman Avenue Press, 2016) and The Fifth Thought (Other Painters Press, 2008), as well as the young adult novel Alma Presses Play (Penguin/Random House) . Cane serves as the Poet Laureate of Rhode Island where she is the founder and director of Writers-in-the-Schools, RI. She is the creator/curator of the distance reading series, Poetry is Bread.
Cover image and author photo by Cormac Crump
