Dream in Which I Am Playing with Bees

RK Fauth is a poet whose writing has appeared in POETRY, The Rising Phoenix Review, Blue Unicorn, Dream of the River: an LGBTQ+ Anthology, The Non Binary Review, The Fulbright Korea Infusion, and elsewhere. From 2019–2022, RK ran the award-winning public humanities project, "Unprecedented," which circulated Black Plague–era erasure poems between strangers. She earned an M.A. at Georgetown University, where she also served as a Poetry Fellow at the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice. RK lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, with her fiancé and their two dogs.

"In the introduction to this new collection of poems, A Dream in Which I Am Playing with Bees, RK Fauth tells us that the subsequent verses are 'artifacts' of a fictional world. The book itself is more of an assemblage of testimonies that support the imagined environment—a group of artifacts (poems) uncovered in the same archeological (fabled) context. In the aftermath of this chimerical calamity, the writer finds a space of infinite reflection wherein the intrinsic values of these precious creatures are examined in hindsight. The poetry doesn’t follow the literal echoes of such a loss as much as the infinitude of metaphorical and cultural ripples, growing the more they spread through our dreams, our language, and our identities. In Fauth’s brilliant collection of unearthed, lyrical artifacts, the poetry is volcanic and mesmerizing as it exposes the truth about our language—that it needs to be expressed to and for someone who can act, and that it exists in that space between and among things, in the relations between us. Fauth’s poems guide us through the work needed to be done to reach out simply by looking in."—Mikal Wix, West Trade Review (January 2024)