Bone Honey
Bone Honey: Poems of Motherhood, Survival, and the Raising of Dry Bones is a lyrical collection that explores what women inherit, what mothers carry, and what daughters must learn to name. Through a chorus of voices, the poems traverse Southern memory, faith, family, and Black womanhood, confronting the wounds that shape generations and the resilience that sustains them.
A defining feature of the collection is the Bone Tales, a series of poems shaped by Black Southern oral storytelling traditions. Inspired by the sound and intimacy of porch talk, the Bone Tales use shifting speakers, Southern vernacular, testimony, blues cadence, prayer, and lyrical reflection to give each poem a distinct voice and rhythm. Rather than documenting a single life, they bring imagined, remembered, inherited, and shared experiences into conversation, giving readers breathing room to recognize echoes of their own stories.
Bone Honey speaks to those who have raised children through difficult seasons, wrestled with faith, survived painful histories, or sought healing. At once a collective witness and an offering of hope, the collection draws sweetness from hard places and asks what it means to breathe life into the parts of ourselves and our histories that have been buried.
How Bone Honey Came to Be
Bone Honey began in the pages of a private journal, a place where thoughts about motherhood, faith, survival, and family could be held without explanation. Over the years, those early writings and poems were revisited, revised, and reimagined. As they began speaking to one another, a shared architecture emerged. Bone became inheritance and endurance; marrow, the hidden life carried within; honey, the sweetness gathered from hard places; and resurrection, the possibility of rising after loss.
Cynthia Jean Brown is a Black Southern writer, literary cartographer, and founder of Cynthia Jean Brown Literary, LLC. Her work explores motherhood, faith, memory, place, and the stories carried through generations. She is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection Bone Honey: Poems of Motherhood, Survival, and the Raising of Dry Bones.
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