Honeyfish confronts life and death. The collection begins and ends with poems that memorialise and mourn the deaths of African Americans who have died at police hands, though to call them poems of protest would simplify their exploration of what life means in relation to death.

It is a collection whose architecture works to make each poem, beautiful in their singular grace, add up to much more than the sum of their individual parts. Thus, the poems that explore the complexities of a life that involves the dislocations of migration, the pain of racism and misogyny and the sometimes fraught complications of love and family life speak all the more strongly of the value of a determined engagement with life because of their relationship to the poems that address the suddenness of death.