Peg Boyers, Author of Honey with Tobacco

by Shannon K. Winston

Peg Boyers’s recent book, Honey with Tobacco, is a refreshing collection of poetry that grapples with what it means to live between multiple cultures, geographical borders, and languages. Unlike her debut publication, Hard Bread, which was narrated through Boyer’s interpretation of the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg’s voice, Honey with Tobacco is largely autobiographical. Speaking to us in October, Boyers says that Hard Bread was still a necessary step towards telling a more personal story: “in order for me to reach that personal dimension at that early stage of my writing career I needed a mask, a persona, in whose voice I could comfortably explore many of the themes which I continued to explore in the second book: motherhood, marriage, betrayal, faith.”

Honey with Tobacco thus marks a transition in Boyer’s work. The first section centers on her experience growing up in Cuba and her early love of the Italian language, which she learned as an adolescent living in Italy. While each poem stands alone in the collection, they are all united by a desire to probe different spaces: the geographical distances between the States, Cuba, and Italy, but also the white gaps on the page, as well. In much of her poetry, Boyers artfully incorporates Spanish and Italian words and phrases into her poems. There is also a clear polyvocality and dialogic quality to her work. She explained to me that “the use of foreign languages enabled [her] to project a voice which accurately reflects [her] own mixed up background—the melting pot effect I guess you could all it.” Her use of Spanish and Italian, even for readers who do not speak these languages, gives her writing a sensual, polyphonetic quality, which transports them into the liminal places/spaces she describes. Far from confusing readers, her use of language makes her poems more tangible and immediate. Boyers herself explained: “The words are used for their sound as much as for their meaning. There is no more beautiful sound than the sound of an Italian word, even when that word is an obscenity.” In the first part of Honey with Tobacco, Spanish is especially central to the narrative. She explains: “In a way Spanish is one of the subjects of that section for me, the expression of that part of my psyche, of my identity, that will not stay submerged.”

The poem, “Transition: Inheriting Maps,” is one of the clearest examples of the way in which themes of language and geography figure in this collection. The poem’s speaker attempts “to see without glasses,/ measuring memory against grid,/ matching history with place.” Here, as elsewhere in the collection, Boyers uses her own past to map a larger political and social history. This discussion is inextricably tied to language. The speaker continues: “locating the whereness and the whatness/ of the intransitive was—/without object or home,/ united in the grammar of common/longing.” In her poems, Boyers’s speaker never “successfully” locates her identity. In her own words: “the elements have not really blended. They remain distinct and even at times are at war with one another for dominance.” It is precisely this poetic space—one that embraces distinctions and tensions— that ignites and carries this collection.

Peg Boyers teaches creative writing at Skidmore College. She is also the executive editor of Salmagundi.

To purchase Honey with Tobacco, please visit the following website.

Shannon K. Winston grew up between France and the States. She is currently a graduate student at the University of Michigan in the Comparative Literature Department. She studies 19th - 20th Century Mediterranean Literature (from France, Italy and North Africa.)