Appetite: Food as Metaphor: An Anthology of Women Poets

by Phyllis Stowell (Editor), Jeanne Foster (Editor)

Overview

In poems from as varied women poets as Jane Kenyon, Lucille Clifton, and Anne Sexton, food emerges as a re-occurring and central metaphor in the way women live, in the pulse of the everyday, and as a vehicle for the exotic. From coffee to caviar, from potatoes to dandelions—even in hunger and anorexia—the metaphors of food have worked like yeast in the imagination of these poets.

Preface by Chef Charlotte Turgeon.

Phyllis Stowell initiated the Saint Mary’s College of California MFA program. She is a former Fellow of the Camargo Foundation and was a Dewitt Wallace/Reader’s Digest Fellow at the MacDowell Colony. She was granted a Barbara Deming Money for Women Award and was a winner of the International Quarterly Crossing Boundaries Poetry Prize. Her publications include Assent to Solitude, Who Is Alice?, and Sequence and Consequence, an Alchemical Journal. She publishes poetry, criticism, and poetry reviews.

Jeanne Foster is a Professor in the Graduate Liberal Studies program at Saint Mary’s College of California. Her critical book, A Music of Grace, explores the vision of the sacred in contemporary American poetry, and her poetry collection, A Blessing of Safe Travel, won the Quarterly Review of Literature Award in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in Triquarterly, Hudson Review, North American Review, Ploughshares, and other journals.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781929918249
Publisher:	BOA Editions, Ltd.
Publication date:	10/01/2002
Series:	Boa Anthology Series
Edition description:	1ST
Pages:	180
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

Table of Contents

	Preface	11
	Introduction	12
	Soup, a Fragrance Rising: Family
	Arabic Coffee	19
	Family Reunion	20
	Blueberry City	21
	Apples	23
	Le Dejeuner	25
	All the Soups	27
	Mother Love	28
	Conservancies	29
	Let the Raspberry Jam in the Crystal Jar Stand for It	30
	Ethiopia	32
	Potatoes	33
	Dandelion Greens	35
	Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman	36
	Pulp and Juice: Sexuality
	Cutting Greens	41
	Pomegranates	42
	Eggs	43
	In the Pea Patch	44
	Bite into the Onion	45
	Anna Magnani at the Castro	47
	Tortillas	49
	Burning the Water Hyacinth	50
	Snack	51
	Risible	52
	The Lobster	53
	The Milkman	54
	Pleasures of the Flesh	55
	Common Prayer	57
	Never May the Fruit Be Plucked	58
	Good Friday, Alice Liddell	59
	Gathering the Wild Figs--Vizcaina, Gomera	62
	The Dangers of Looking Back	63
	"Daphne with Her Thighs in Bark"	65
	Beans Mostly: Oppression
	The Testimony of Light	69
	The Bean Eaters	70
	Starvation	71
	Anorexia	72
	Eid al-Fitr	73
	Ancestral Messengers/Composition 13	75
	Rafaela Who Drinks Coconut & Papaya Juice on Tuesdays	76
	On Stopping Late in the Afternoon for Steamed Dumplings	77
	This Winter's Night	78
	Kitchen	79
	Refugee Ship	82
	Existentially Speaking	83
	As Like As Not	84
	And Cause His Countenance to Shine upon You: Corpus Christi, Texas	87
	Bear Fat	89
	Soldiers	91
	Fresh-Catch, Boned and Skinned: Death
	Fragment from "Easter"	95
	A Bit of Rice	96
	Crepuscule with Muriel	97
	Allegory of the Supermarket	98
	Eating the Cookies	100
	Camellia Sabina	101
	My Garden, My Delight	104
	Baskets	106
	Amaryllis	109
	Boiled Peanuts	110
	Cutting the Cake	111
	Ants on the Melon	112
	Wedding Banquet	113
	Skylord	115
	Mary's Song	116
	Heavenly Feast: Transformation
	My Heart, Being Hungry	119
	Three from the Market	120
	The Traveling Onion	122
	The Mango's Core	123
	How to Stuff a Pepper	124
	Seder	125
	Studying Wu Wei, Muir Beach	127
	Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks	129
	I Had Been Hungry, All the Years	130
	Art Thou the Thing I Wanted?	131
	Night	132
	Spell to Be Said After Illness	133
	The Scales	134
	Plantings	136
	The Heavenly Feast	138
	O Taste and See	142
	Acknowledgments	145
	About the Editors	151
	Colophon	152