“Sorrow and resilience converge in the sharp-eyed second book from Honum (Tulip Flame), rich with a lexicon for the inanimate and the restorative capacity of the imagination…Rife with radiant conceits and brisk realism, these are memorable and rich poems."
—Publishers Weekly


"miraculous, classically beautiful…this book, like all [Honum’s] work, has a balletic grace and precision."
—Betsy Bonner, The Cortland Review


“Honum’s work is often oneiric in its precisions and perceptions. The dreamy rooms of these stanzas are suffused with rain, clouds, snow, feathers, and wings, possessing their own emotional weather.”
—Lisa Russ Spaar, Los Angeles Review of Books


"Here is a story told in dazzling music, composed as much from silence as sound, by a speaker who is brave, honest, funny, and clear. With each new word, she steps us forward with the care we use to move into the dark night, when we cannot see the path ahead."
—Rebecca Gayle Howell, The Common: A Modern Sense of Place


"To alter what is unalterable, fixed, immovable—that is this collection’s thrilling, devastating task.”
—Katie Schmid, Broadsided Press


"A poet of startling figuration and generosity, Chloe Honum offers readers a window into a lush-intricate inner world reflected in tactile experiences of landscape, weather, and yearning. In this second full-length collection, Honum’s speaker travels with a lodestar of primary, familial loss, and meets the world with as much rawness as empathy. It is a wonder to read a book whose gravity is tuned to grief and yet turns toward revelatory observation and compassion for the scope of human experience."
—Sara Ellen Fowler, Rhino Poetry


“Honum—once the ballet dancer—has an enviable quality of channeling heightened emotion that doesn’t feel rehearsed, and without losing dramatic appeal…For all its fragility, The Lantern Room is deceivingly anchored in health and strength.”
—Ellen Elder, Tupelo Quarterly


"The Lantern Room begins with a speaker who might be 'the translator' of the 'ancient, mottled language' of an angel, and from that beginning onward reads as if it had been written toward achieving the language of angels. These poems foreground lyricism in such a way as to make meaning seem a natural outgrowth of music—they are, as a consequence, some of the most purely lyric poems I’ve read in years. Reading them, I at times wondered how Honum dared to write them, to brave such music. But I am so grateful she did."
—Shane McCrae, author of Sometimes I Never Suffered


"In Chloe Honum’s crystalline The Lantern Room, we encounter and re-encounter the chronic dreams of grief. From Auckland to Arkansas, in austere rooms of hospitals and hotels or in rain-swept fields of flowers and insects, the poet’s eloquence makes permanent and glistening a landscape indifferent to human pain: ‘the wind carries petals over dusk’s border. / Sparrows hunt for their inheritance in the trampled grass.’ From the beginning I have loved and sought out Chloe Honum’s poems, craving their spareness and intensity, their assuredness of style and depth of feeling. “I would side with winter,” the speaker of one poem claims, and it’s true: these poems possess and enact an arctic beauty. The hard-edged language of her lines and her sumptuous descriptions immerse us in a world that is so finely rendered and atmospheric at the same time."
—Richie Hofmann, author of A Hundred Lovers


"In The Lantern Room, her exquisite new collection, Chloe Honum moves, as her poems do, with range, precision, and astonishing beauty…The collection closes with sublime meditations on the speaker’s mother’s death: ‘How will I live without her?’ How, indeed. This book is that survival, and more than that, an extraordinary mind pressing through language to speak so deeply, so startlingly, the reader is made larger to receive its enormous gift: ‘But I have rain in my hair. This much is true. Let me bring it to you.’"
—Allison Benis White, author of The Wendys


"The Lantern Room is stunning and harrowing, built of poems that interrogate the wound of grief, the wound of love, and insist on asking an impossible question. The tender exposure is intimate and ongoing, a pulse just below the surface, steady beneath the fluorescent lights, the sunlight, the rain, the humming bees, behind the series of doors, inside the temporary rooms. As Honum writes, The light is slippery. Everything hums. It is so important to go on naming; it is this slipperiness—with language, mood, memory, desire—that keeps us a little off-kilter as we feel our way through the tenuous intensities of sorrow and beauty, sometimes dreamy and sometimes despairing and also, despite it all, sometimes shimmering — O cold, dicey blooms — with hopefulness.’"
—Allison Titus, author of Sum of Every Lost Ship