Mary Ann Honaker

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Mary Ann Honaker is the author of Becoming Persephone (Third Lung Press, 2019) and Whichever Way the Moon (Main Street Rag, 2023), along with the chapbooks It Will Happen Like This  (YesNo Press, 2015) and  Gwen and the Big Nothing (The Orchard Street Press, 2020). Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has won first place in the West Virginia Writers Contest for Long Poetry in 2022. Her work has been included in The Women of Appalachia Project’s Women Speak anthologies 6 and 7, in Nixes Mate’s anthology, In the Time of Covid, and Lily Poetry Review’s anthology, Voices Amidst the Virus. She currently lives in Beckley, West Virginia.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

ME/CFS is an illness that strips you of more than mere energy; it dismantles your identity. Honaker grapples with this loss of self––a self that loved, a self fragmented and baffling––always returning to the present where the power of ME/CFS remains. Honaker looks at the illness and the self through many lenses: a prehistoric snake, the power of goddess myths, Renaissance painting, ancient philosophy, religious artifacts, quantum physics, the natural world, and even modern horror. She ends where she began: with the tension between accepting the limitations of ME/CFS and the unlikely hope for a cure.

ADVANCE PRAISE:

In Night Is Another Realm Altogether, Mary Ann Honaker captures in poetry what it feels like—what it means—to live in an ill body. Simultaneously intimate and universal, these poems capture in spare rhythms and resonant expression the paradoxical experience of life in a body that refuses. Like Honaker, I am a person living in an unruly body. Her poems speak to me and for me. They speak for all of us.

––Jennifer Lunden, author of AMERICAN BREAKDOWN: Our Ailing Nation,
My Body’s Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life

In Night Is Another Realm Altogether, Honaker brings her knowledge of mythology and theological studies to bear on a mid-life diagnosis of ME/CF. Opening with, “My illness swallows me whole,” she limns the reality of living with an invisible illness through the grayness of days, her inability to move or read, her subsequent depression. Wolves, snakes and other animals help; they’re fearsome, yet, kin. These poems also illumine the small victories of creating a self within the dissolution. She learns to let go of a past love and finds “. . . the writing is our lamp into the underworld.” “Everyone knows the Good is constant. . . I peel back another face to search for where the Good may be hiding.”

––Suzanne Edison, author Since the House Is Burning

Mary Ann Honaker’s Night is Another Realm Altogether navigates acceptance and transformation of illness, violence, loss, love, the body, and self. Rich in language, the voice in these poems shifts cleanly and surprisingly between the personal, physical, spiritual, classical, philosophical, mythological, and natural worlds, studded with lyric moments so precisely that the language seems inevitable and powerful, beyond the usual poetic craft. This collection will break your heart but leave you glad for it.

––M.P. Carver, author of Selachimorpha and Hard Up