The Lantern Room

“In The Lantern Room, her exquisite new collection, Chloe Honum moves, as her poems do, with range, precision, and astonishing beauty. Honum’s speaker travels across Arkansas motel to motel, missing a beloved, and in the book’s crown jewel, ‘The Common Room,’ chronicles an out-patient hospitalization in a psychiatric ward. The collection closes with sublime meditations on the speaker’s mother’s death: ‘How will I live without her?’ How, indeed. This book is that survival, and more than that, an extraordinary mind pressing through language to speak so deeply, so startlingly, the reader is made larger to receive its enormous gift: ‘But I have rain in my hair. This much is true. Let me bring it to you.’” —Allison Benis Whit