Honest Sonnets

This magical and exquisitely honest journey of birthing a self, underscores a young girl's agony and ecstasy as her dreamer parents chase unharnessed desires, leaving her holding the bag, searching for solid ground. Nicole's storytelling is at once vivid, shameless, dangerous and bursting with her unwavering commitment to family.

-Tina Alexis Allen, author of Hiding Out - a memoir of drugs, deception, and double lives

Prepare for adventures from New York City to Mexico to West Virginia to Louisiana as Honest Sonnets chronicles a childhood of the 60s and 70s. Nicole Farmer's poems beguile from "Toddler" in the "butt end of the VW bug where I got to stand and bounce" to arriving in NYC as a young adult for a theatrical career. She weaves a narrative that seems fantastical at times but is always grounded in stunning detail, as in "Civil Rights/ not my first march of shoes and legs, we hustle towards/ Lincoln Memorial to hear Martin Luther King, Jr." or "1969/ My parents are dancing in the fountain in Chapultepec." or "Packing/ How much life fits into a cardboard box?" These sonnets have the pacing and turns of someone who knows the art of theater as well as poetry. Nicole Farmer is an emerging poet to read and watch.

-Kathleen Calby, author of Flirting with Owls