Walt MacDonald First Book Prize in Poetry, Texas Tech University Press (2024)
Finalist for the Audre Lorde Award in Poetry (2025)
What could disappear from our minds if nature is no longer a mirror?
The poems in A Dream in Which I Am Playing with Bees explore the effect of species extinction on language and the human imagination. This is a collection made of natural imagery, queer metaphors, personal observations, and historical circumstances surrounding honeybees. Whether a single line or an entire premise, none of the poems could speak in the same way if bees--and the relations they make possible--suddenly disappeared. Playing with Bees positions poetry as “artifacts” of a bygone world - an ecologically-intact dream.
As we approach our sixth mass species extinction, poetry, too, will change. So will the animal mirrors for our innermost selves. Playing with Bees looks into the gaps left behind when a peg in the environment is removed. What symbolic systems--of folklore, food, beauty, nomenclature--would also perish, and what would crop up in their place?
“Staggeringly bright.”
- Rachel Mennies
“Volcanic and mesmerizing.”
- Mikal Wix, “Language and the Ecology of Loss in RK Fauth’s A Dream in Which I Am Playing with Bees,” West Trade Review
“A poignant meditation on how we imagine the natural world … and the mystery of what exists beyond our ability to express.”
—Matthew Olzmann, on selecting the Prelude poem for a Treehouse Climate Action Prize
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