Sealey Challenge #2

**‘Honey Monster’ (Broken Sleep Books, 2022) by Bobby Parker**.

This is Bobby Parker’s recent collection with Broken Sleep Books, mainly using prose or prose-poetry to explore issues of survival, recovery and suffering through his protagonist ‘Bobby’. His previous publishers include KFS Publications, Nine Arches, Offord Road Books and Secret Sleep Books.

‘Honey Monster’ flies and burns bright in its excoriating engagement with male violence, failure and the damage rendered in the human heart by the original sins of poverty, abuse in childhood, venality, addiction and fear. Part biography, part polemic the hero of the book is afraid of the harm he caused and avoided. He writes this about his baby brother:

He doesn’t know anything, except that he loves me. It’s a miracle how close it came. Children only giggle this way for such a short time, it hurts to think about. It smells like my brother’s nappy is full. I was only goofing around, bored like you wouldn’t believe, starved of stimulation. The week-old birthday balloons are starting to sag. A cold breeze flickers in through the back door, making them nod to each other like sad old managers on the armchair nobody uses. Look at them leaking knackered breath, taunting me, begging to be popped. Whoa! I must have been holding it wrong. When I throw it, the flat side of the knife wallops off the red balloon like the second coming of Christ, zipping over my right shoulder into the wall above my darling brother’s head. Holy piss! An inch closer and my brother would be dead.

‘Skin Past bone’ pp. 27 – 28.

Parker’s writing is vivid, full of jeopardy and insight. His brilliant use of simile owes more to Raymond Chandler than Anne Sexton; some brief examples:

‘His small face crashes through my brain like a 1950s advert for dark red soap.’ (p.28)

‘Mothman shifts from scene to scene like a hotel creep’s binoculars.’ (p.49)

‘My daughter’s brain is like a giant marshmallow, pummelled by divorce.’ (p.59)

‘Moving through cracked open spaces like traumatised dogs.’ (p.59)

The stand-out sections of the book are ‘Resurrection Mary’ – a lyric essay that brims with compassion and love about Bobby’s relationship with his nanna Mary and her life – and ‘Honey Monster’, a rite-of-passage account of bullying, the desire for revenge, and formation through a story of men’s work and the dreadful relationship with Henry:

Henry would tell me that he didn’t think I had any balls. It was his mantra, ‘Bobby no balls…Bobby no balls…’. He said it so often I started believing it. I didn’t have balls in a symbolic, spineless way, and the balls I did have were somehow foreign and unnecessary. I could genuinely sense their absence. I still feel completely overwhelmed by their alien attachment to my soft, cowardly body. He knew I was desperate. That’s why he worked me so hard and paid such a pathetic wage (off the books, of course). I was a builder’s bargain. A shy, malleable addict. Low self-esteem. Pretty, in a certain horrified light, like an abandoned pushchair in the fog. The day I almost took his life, I was sweeping up and trying to look busy…

‘Honey Monster’ p.88

Parker brings the lyric shame of confessional poetry from the twentieth century and offers it redemption through its need to resist violence, shed light on men’s experience of familial and sexual abuse, and the injustices of power dynamics in the lives of those abandoned, mistreated and ignored. This urgent work is like the love-child of Robert Tressell and Donald Ray Pollock full of necessary, timely and brilliant writing.

If I had the power to do so I would put ‘Honey Monster’ on the GCSE syllabus. It would save lives. Bravo Bobby Parker. Bravo Broken Sleep Books.

Burning Bright