Customer Reviews

Bite to Eat Place: An Anthology of Contemporary Food Poetry & Poetic Prose

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I read three or four books of poetry a week. It's a major jones for me and, as you might assume, I get enormous pleasure from it. A while back, I was invited to be a reader at a jazz brunch and thought it would be great to find food poems to read. This anthology filled the bill. The editors have collected poems from good to excellent on all aspects of food in American culture: recipes, meats, vegetables, obsessions (including bulemia), food as metaphor (yes; you have a good idea of where that's going), ways food brings us together and ways it pulls us apart, how we get it, who won and who lost in the process of obtaining it. And wit. Yes, wit. If the gorgeous seduction of Ondaatje's "The Cinnamon Peeler" doesn't make you rush to the cashier like a teenager purchasing his first girly magazine, then the elation of "The Fat Enter Heaven" by Wesley McNair or the simple meditation of a lonely traveler in his hotel room on the room-service menu (Christopher Woods's "Potatoes by Phone") will make you saunter in the same direction with basically the same motivation: you'll want to own this book.