Tart Honey

These poems explore the experience of a long marriage, and a decade of living at a distance. They ask how this love began, and how it might end.

""Deborah Burnham's Tart Honey explores old love through the lens of long-earned authority, delving into temporary separations while anticipating more permanent ones. We trust her rich powers of description--the dense, lush imagery, the pulsing rhythms of life, the confident control while exploring something both fragile and durable. She looks back, looks forward, while carrying on in the moment. Her work is an inspiration to all of us. In the face of knowing it must all end, Burnham reminds us of the sustaining power of love.""
--Jim Daniels, author of The Middle Ages

""Tart Honey is a page-turner. It tells the story of commuter love, marriage a la mode. The few days the poet can afford to spend with her lover pass quickly. They are full of urgent beauty: ""peaches ripening as slowly as the sun . . . the wet moon startling birds into song."" Read Tart Honey for its lyricism, its faith in love, and its careful thought about what love means.""
--Jeanne Murray Walker, author of Helping the Morning

""What a lush collection of poems Deborah Burnham has written, a chronicle of a long-standing commuter marriage whose intimacies are as sensual as summer, whose weekly separations are as poignant as moonlight on dark water. To lose the touch and feel of love, the poems suggest, is to lose the earth itself in all its verdancy. To regain it is to hear birdsong once again, to taste the luscious honey of days on the tongue.""
--Gregory Djanikian, author of Dear Gravity

""Spare yet intricate, sweetly astringent, Tart Honey is a masterful examination of love and loss in contemporary midlife. Burnham's deft poems cast an ethereal gloss on everyday domestic realities and distill the notional to pungent life.""
--Karen Rile, editor-in chief, Cleaver Magazine


Deborah Burnham lives in Philadelphia, teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, and leads therapeutic writing groups for cancer survivors. She is the author of Anna and the Steel Mill (1995), a volume of poems set in her home state of Ohio.