2023 read #47: The Honey Month by Amal El-Mohtar.

The Honey Month by Amal El-Mohtar

Introduction by Danielle Sucher

Artwork by Oliver Hunter

75 pages

Published 2010

Read May 4

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

“Every honey has its story,” Danielle Sucher writes in the introduction, a description caught in the hazy half-light between longing and warning. Sucher provided the thirty or so vials of honey that inspired El-Mohtar’s month of honey-tasting and “literary synesthesia.” The Honey Month is the result: a series of sweetly dreamlike fables, delicate brushes with fae strangeness, snowy glimpses of childhood sorrow and wonder, and swooningly erotic poetry spun like sugar from the sensory experience of each successive honey.

The pure truth and wonder of this book is in El-Mohtar’s sensory perception, her precision with imagery and taste, her unfailingly luminous descriptions, the lingering savor of a tongue tenuous between sense and word.

It would be terribly predictable to call this writing delicious, but few words are more apt.

A running list of favorite pieces (though every one of them is magnificent and not to be missed):

“Day 1 — Fireweed Honey”

“Day 2 — Peach Creamed Honey”

“Day 5 — Cranberry Creamed Honey”

“Day 7 — Thistle Honey”

“Day 11 — Blackberry Honey”

“Day 12 — Red Gum Honey”

“Day 15 — Hungarian Forest Honey”

“Day 17 — Ugandan Honey”

“Day 21 — Bamboo Honey”

“Day 24 — Apricot Creamed Honey”

“Day 27 — Leatherwood Honey”

“Day 28 — French Chestnut Honey”