Bull City Press Editors’ Selection from Frost Place Chapbook Competition
Small Press Distribution Bestseller

“astonishingly attentive empathy…these beautiful, brave poems insist on a place for language in a broken world.”
—Lisa Russ Spaar, At Length

“a fierce talent… Like Dickinson’s famous speaker, [Honum] hits a world at every plunge.”
—Austin Segrest, Southern Humanities Review

“Honum returns in Then Winter to hollow out a space for herself alongside Jane Hirshfield as one of the best short poem writers we currently know…Already there is a transcendent quality to her work, which falls both as lightly and coldly as snow across the reader’s back.”
—Katherine Frain, The Blueshift Journal

“I’m obsessed with Chloe Honum’s chapbook Then Winter which explores mental illness and the natural world with precision, tenderness, and complicated insight…Hers is a poetry so alive and compassionate that it can hurt to read—like stepping out after too much time in a stuffy room and having to adjust one’s eyes to the light.”
—Chen Chen, Poetry 

“[Then Winter] works to destigmatize mental illness and sings a love song for snowy days in Massachusetts.”
—Chen Chen, Poets & Writers 

“In nearly every poem in this new collection, form and content meld into a seamless whole…[Honum’s] poetry treats people with mental illness not as jargon-tagged curios but as humans with the divine breath of life in them, with agency and creativity, their souls too fluid to withstand being boxed neatly into textbook categories.”
—Jenna Le, Poetry Northwest

“Crisp and exacting, bright and sharp, Chloe Honum’s Then Winter cuts surgically…”
—Cheyenne Taylor, Birmingham Poetry Review 

“in this stunning collection, Honum crafts the work in such a way that each line, each turn of phrase becomes a thought-provoking collaboration which the reader, an invitation to imagine alongside the narrator.”
—Kristina Marie Darling, The Chattahoochee Review 

“a poet of exquisite talent…”
—Beth Kephart, Juncture Notes

“captivating….breathtaking poems…”
—Munira Chowdhury, Shirisherdalpala

“This bittersweet collection is haunting, and contained within are poems to cherish.”
—Barbara Bailey, A Fine Line: The New Zealand Poetry Society

“a remarkable chapbook.”
—Tyler Sheldon, The Los Angeles Review

“On the surface, Chloe Honum’s chapbook, Then Winter, is a powerfully quiet meditation on a speaker’s experiences at a psychiatric ward. But the book is really about the power of nature, nature as ‘conqueror’ in all of its beauty—Honum’s unromantic nature is the prism in which the speaker refracts her life, it’s a way for the speaker to parse or re-angle pain. Honum’s poems and voice are steely, unforgettable, and full of treasures. And her gifts are immensely palpable.”
—Victoria Chang, author of The Boss 

“A fly dying in a fluorescent light fixture as snow silences the outside world . . . these poems name an extreme moment with eerie delicacy, so that we are inside it.”
—Nick Flynn, author of My Feelings 

“‘Hope is anything/ that travels in big leaps,’ writes Chloe Honum. Her singular chapbook leads us down the fluorescent corridors of mental hospitals, adding grace notes to the world Lowell memorialized. For quite some time it has felt like mental house poems left us with only Sexton putting on her fur coat in her closed garage with the car turned on. Yet here, hope lunges at us, as if Dickinson had decided to pole-vault out of her window. Honum takes a big leap. What pleasure to witness.”
—Spencer Reece, author of The Road to Emmaus