Honey Mine

"Reading Honey Mine, I am constantly crashing through meaning and emerging on the other side—as the author-specter Camille Roy is my witness."—The Paris Review

“This inventive and substantial collection from poet and performance artist Roy (Sherwood Forest) demonstrates the author’s sharp wit and laser-eyed analysis of gender and class issues, punctuated by perspective on the realities of being a lesbian in the U.S. …Fans of experimental fiction should take note.”—Publishers Weekly Starred Review

"Camille Roy’s rich literary collection Honey Mine features outcasts and shows what it’s like to live as one."—Foreword Reviews

"Honey Mine is an archive of feeling and experience; despite Roy’s assertion that she’s never written a coming-out story, Honey Mine offers its readers a sweet entanglement of story, essay, and poetry that traces Camille’s collision with and discovery of the worlds around her — from the Southside of Chicago to a Rocky Mountain mining town where Mina Loy is in residence, to a massage parlor in Michigan, then to San Francisco."—Jacket2

"The crystalline, perfectly-tuned prose and charming characters of Honey Mine are more than enough, I think, to leave any reader happy; but for those with any relationship to lesbianism, past or present, this book is a new sacred text."—Full Stop

"The title Honey Mine is an endearment—my beloved—and a fanciful place of extraction, the site where sweetness is dug from a dark crevice. Roy hands us chunks of honeycomb to cram into our mouths and let drip from our chins. Don’t you want to come along?"—Tripwire

"While Honey Mine as a collection is a kind of “historical document,” it is more than that as well, charged and burning with its own undiminished radical power."—The Rupture

"It’s poetry stretched over mountains of prose, mythic and dirty like a genius’s sex diary told outta the side of their mouth in a torn bathrobe with a topical map on the back that includes genitals, wisdom & lore. It’s held together by love – lost & known. And the healing power of silence. Honey Mine is one hell of a unique book. It’s a study. It disrupts the category, be it literature, fiction, the essay or the lesbian. It says: whatever you have the nerve to do, I will also do. Honey Mine is an inspirational work."—Eileen Myles

"This is a huge book; it belongs in the cannon of the best queer writers. To read Honey Mine is to be inhabited by the largesse of the word “lesbian,” body, sex, sexuality. And by a lesbian aesthetic of human relations, bookended by the author’s magnificent enduring love with her late partner Angie. These fictions, in resisting…before the theorems arrive… teleological primness, parade language nimble enough to absorb class, cities, memory, grief, shame, without sacrificing a cornucopia  of pleasures. Like a tarte tatin, Honey Mine spills over with deliciousness. My tactic vis a vis narrative, says Camille Roy, is really just to bring abandonment into the relationship. She succeeds marvellously."—Gail Scott

"From Camille Roy’s work, I have learned literal worlds; frog-kicked through summers in musty, abandoned cabins, tread the concrete divisions of Chicago’s South Side. In this expansive, formally promiscuous collection, 'stories don’t work.' Fiction and fantasy function not as creative effacements of the brute facts of queer life, but as the very means by which that life innovates itself—as relational, as fickle, as an ongoing 'survival of self.' Gauntlet of girlhood ideology, love letter peeled open like a garlic clove. Honey Mine takes apart the toolbox of narrative mechanisms; the aberrant languages and intimacies we use to scrape, mould and manipulate one another. Never bowing to romanticism and yet unmistakable in its communion, this is a book that has, in many ways, seeded and re-made me. I am so grateful for it."—Trisha Low