with Bees is a collection of poems made of natural
imagery, queer metaphors, personal observations, and historical circumstances
surrounding honeybees. In the aftermath of a fictional bee extinction, these
poems are presented to the post-bee reader as "artifacts."

Playing
with Bees positions
poetry in hindsight to contemplate poetry's "natural" inclinations toward
building alternative worlds through earthbound metaphors. Whether a single line or an entire premise, none of the poems could think, speak, or see in the same way
if bees--and the relations they make possible--suddenly disappeared. Like any
natural resource, the bee is a wellspring of possibility. Essential. Fragile.
Causal. And like any animal, the pollinating bee has enabled a diverse phylum
of phrases and myths that humans trade to express our most hard-to-name
feelings.

What
in our imagination changes after a peg in the environment is removed? What
could disappear from our minds, our fantasies, and our self-descriptors, if
nature is no longer a mirror?

Consider a museum of language. As artifacts, these poems are
the residue of a dead species--but they are also the offshoots of a playful,
abundant, delicate ecosystem. Playing with Bees covets what's left. At
the bottom of everything, we find the fragments of an ecologically intact dream:
an apocalypse in reverse.