Gregory Emilio\'s Kitchen Apocrypha delves richly and sensuously into food as sustenance, ritual, pleasure, and temptation.
The poetry in Kitchen Apocrypha, about the preparation and consumption and worship of food, is a cuisine of muchness and plenty, and delicious in the richness of its v.
Food is both literal and metaphorical. - Karl Kirchwey, author of Stumbling Blocks Though Jesus assured us that we could not live by bread alone, still manna from heaven manifested itself as bread, and the eucharist is a meal of bread and wine.
This book is good company.
The true hospitality here is not an industry but a sacred duty to the stranger (to the reader), what the Greeks call xenia.
The elemental fire by which food becomes food is felt also as the Paradise (California) wildfire, for the contents and activities of the kitchen, Emilio suggests, are a way of understanding the world.
It examines food service as well as food; it examines anorexia as well as satiety.
Beginning with a delightful amatory /gustatory rewrite of Yeats\'s Leda and the Swan (we stumbled out of the bedroom, dizzy / and undone, rapt and abandoned: hungry), this collection riffs on many foodstuffs, spinning through poetic forms as it does so. - Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic The fact that food, like sex, mediates for us with death provides the guiding metaphor for Gregory Emilio\'s ingenious book Kitchen Apocrypha, which might equally well be titled Kitchen Epiphany.
Gorgeous, surprising work.
I sing / of a hog theater where hogs performed as men.
As Emilio writes in one unforgettable page (a cento!): Saint Anthony, patron of sausage makers, / guide my pen and unkink my tongue.
This book is alive.
There is elegy and rhapsody.
There are prayers here and songs of wonder, there is a communal voice and one of solitude.
Gregory Emilio understands this beautifully.
PRAISE FOR Kitchen Apocrypha: A poet is a professor of the five senses, Lorca taught us.
A finalist for the 2021 Able Muse Book Award, Kitchen Apocrypha offers a feast both earthy and sublime.
Central to his narrative is a deep reverence for food\'s power to nourish not just the body, but the spirit and human connection as well.
He navigates meals ranging from sacred family recipes to unassuming roadside diners, sprinkling biblical and mythological allusions throughout.
Drawing upon his food service experiences, Emilio contemplates hunger, abundance, community, and solitude through the lens of culinary arts.
Gregory Emilio\'s Kitchen Apocrypha delves richly and sensuously into food as sustenance, ritual, pleasure, and temptation
