Florida Honey, by Amanda-Gaye Smith

Poetry, chapbook, 20 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Florida Honey is inspired by the roadside signs lining the small highways intersecting North Central Florida. These signs are always hand painted, overgrown, hawking peaches, honey, oranges, boiled peanuts. These poems are vignettes, little flashes of a humid life realized in the wetlands surviving between urban sprawl.

Little stories, like the little road sign farm stands, carving out moments of pause and memory. The bites of writing are inspired by characters encountered by the author while bartending in North Central Florida while witnessing the slow loss of wetland wilderness to climate change and unchecked development that plagues this mysterious land.

Originally from the Appalachian mountain slip of SW Virginia, Amanda-Gaye Smith is a visual artist, curator, and poet currently living in the swamps of North Central Florida. She is a graduate of Hollins University and NEARLY completed her Master’s in Arts from Texas Tech University. She has been published in the Triggerfish Critical Review, Hobart Press, The Boiler Review, Royal Rose Magazine, Red Skies Anthology, and others. Her residencies have included stints at Elsewhere Studios in Paonia Colorado and Fermenter Residencies in Gainesville Florida. Florida Honey is her second chapbook following Anatomy of a Guest which was published as a limited edition through Elsewhere Studios.

When she isn’t writing, she is busy training for marathons and is a market development manager for a small fiber optic internet provider.