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'The title of Ann Vickery’s latest book of poems, Bees Do Bother: An Antagonist’s Care Pack, is longer, more complex, and more avowedly academic than is conventional. A number of questions might be asked of it: are the bees metaphorical, being the most basic. In other words, are the bees human? That what ‘bees do [is] bother’ does not clarify, but rather thickens, the meaning of the first part of the title. Bothering seems like a human activity, and suggests, both semantically and sonically, the notion of a ‘bee in a bonnet’ (‘Bad Hat’): but while having a bee in your bonnet is not a passive image exactly, it does suggest being subject to the bee, of the bothering being done to the one with the bonnet, as opposed to being the bee that is doing the bothering.'(Introduction)
