Excerpts from Resin, Thorns, Oil, Lace

by Hadara Bar-Nadav and Peregrine Honig

Jun 1, 2026 | Digital Folios

In response to Peregrine Honig’s suite of paintings, Player

(Custody)

Do you see how I balance, unafraid, umbilical? Beautiful in death, the ram’s-head moon. Negligeed
in ocean blur, draped in layers of gauze.

All my wounds scar over, stitched with a bow. This one redly tied at my neck holds the thread of my
spine to the threat of my skull.

Mother wants to carry me off in her golden boat, but I think I’ll descend where I am. Walk off this
stage, this dripping frame. Walk away from fairy tales, mothers, myths.

I’ll become something new, newly now in your eyes. We all shine, and live with a little death inside.
Peregrine Honig
Custody, 2024
oil and pigmented gesso on canvas
72 x 96 inches (2.4 x 1.8 m)
(Documentation by E.G. Schempf)
(Memento)

The animals whirl, circusy bright. We are all animals here. Animal speech, heartbeat, flight.

Two stories died, two moons. I carved their ache, craved their shape, carried them like children
against my emptied chest.

We run, and we fall. Bleed into soil, salting the earth with our shadows.
Peregrine Honig
Memento, 2024
oil and pigmented gesso on canvas
72 x 96 inches (2.4 x 1.8 m)

Hadara Bar-Nadav is an NEA fellow and author of several award-winning books of poetry, among them The Animal Is Chemical, The New Nudity, Lullaby (with Exit Sign), The Frame Called Ruin, and A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight, as well as the chapbooks Fountain and Furnace and Show Me Yours. She is also co-author of the best-selling textbook Writing Poems, 8th ed. Her poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, and Poetry. A current Reader for Poetry Magazine, she is a Professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Peregrine Honig is an international artist and curator. The process of the paintings included in this publication can be seen through a digital window. #everylayerisaplayer