Jessica Barksdale's second poetry collection Grim Honey and her fifteenth novel The Play's the Thing were both published in 2021. Her novel What the Moon Did will be published in February 2023. Recently retired, she taught composition, literature, and creative writing at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, California for thirty-two years and continues to teach novel writing online for UCLA Extension and in the online MFA program for Southern New Hampshire University. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband.

Other poems by Jessica Barksdale in Verse Daily:

Books by Jessica Barksdale:

Other poems on the web by Jessica Barksdale:
"Privet"

Jessica Barksdale's Website.

Jessica Barksdale on Twitter.

About Grim Honey:

"Grim Honey explores the messiness of the human body and a constellation of losses. Barksdale writes with great verve and energy about every subject from family to travel to death. There's an urgency to these poems, a persistence in all things, whether it's the writing itself or the cataloguing of the world's beauties and tragedies. She knows how to turn a curse into a benediction, an old kitchen into the site of new memories, each pain into the story of a deeply lived life."
—Traci Brimhall

"In the staggering 'Hand-Painted', Jessica Barksdale tells us '[h]e would start one project /and move to the next, / never imagining / he'd die before / completing any.' Everything exists as it is, until alchemy happens—a potent and blunt mythic or natural world is invoked. In 'Three Sisters', we watch a personal mythology unfold, 'the Easter queens, daughters / to our father, rain in the distance. // Time dripped itself loose, and we were still three / but now at war.' In this quietly direct way, new truths are imparted. The generosity of these lessons on decisiveness and focus through the shifting of grief—the many dimensions of the depths of knowing and loving—are meted with great care. This model of growth offers the reader wisdom for how to open and move with a consistently transforming world."
—Kari Flickinger

"Good poems anchor us with vivid detail and provocative language. In Jessica Barksdale's collection, Grim Honey, these poems prove no exception. In the title poem, we see a dead sister as both memory and comet, hurtling toward us unbidden, 'a sweet, ambered fossil / slicing my tongue / with each sharp lick.' Death and loss continue their journey through Barksdale's poems, as in 'This is It,' which remind us lest we forget, 'we are here / and then we are not.' Yet Barksdale finds the sweetness in every moment, in friendships, in parenting, in life: 'Stacked one on top the other / the little things become / the big things / become your tagline / your nom de plume, your / mantra, your slogan / your signature dish.' Grim Honey is about what awaits when we examine our lives and remember that they are, inextricably, always our own."
—Darien Hsu Gee