Scribe in Disguise: Amy Beeder’s “And So Wax Was Made and Also Honey”

“[Amy] Beeder’s nimble adaptiveness and ability to key her lexicon to a wily set of speakers and dramatic personae in And So Wax Was Made and Also Honey are what make this rare book command attention.”

To get a handle on Amy Beeder’s And So Wax Was Made, and Also Honey, which was released with Tupelo Press in 2020, one need go no further than the title of John Keats’s poem Fancy.

Ever let the Fancy roam,

Pleasure never is at home:

At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth,

Like to bubbles when rain pelteth;

Then let winged Fancy wander

Through the thought still spread beyond her:

Open wide the mind’s cage-door,

She’ll dart forth, and cloudward soar.

How to get out of that confounded cage-door that traps our mind in banal, humdrum, daily thought? Fancy, a corruption of the word fantasy, portends imagination and sheer invention; as the mind is given free rein, both soar cloudward. Such an inventor is Beeder, ever seeking “the thought still spread beyond her.” Pleasure in composition lies everywhere in her writing—the scribal other face of suffering—and wander she does, through styles, myth, historical periods, profitably pilfering what sometimes reads like found text and making it her own, even if it already belonged to her to begin with.

Much has been made of Beeder’s superb and inventive lexicon throughout her poetic career, but that is only the beginning of the discussion. What animates that lexicon are a range of qualities of voice, running through each line of verse like the low hum of an electromagnetic field. For in the end, they are all animated by a single voice. The hum of fancy unifies what might otherwise be, in lesser hands, a series of jokey ventriloquistic set pieces.