|
PRAISE FOR RECEIPT
"With a lexical panache and formal liveliness, Receipt makes of personal and domestic travails wondrous record. These poems, fiercely wrought, honor the fragility of the human heart in the daily occasion while flaunting the supreme powers of artistic invention. How thrilling such skill and spirit wanders the same aisles as we do!" —Dean Young "Karen Leona Anderson knows that at the very base of our sophistications we hold true to the fundaments of our animal nature: appetite and display. Part recipe book, part ledger, part lyric-eyed anthropological investigation, part confession, part carnival, part come-on, Receipt—with wit and candor and unexpected compassion—reveals those rituals both deep and tawdry by which the human condition persists in pursuit of what it most wants: beauty, love, food, sex, the big box store called Beyond, the little box store called Home." —Dan Beachy-Quick “Karen Leona Anderson’s Receipt imagines an alternate history of American home economics, in which a split-second instruction from an iconic cookbook or a crumpled drugstore register-tape is a site for narrative and linguistic rapture. The very title Receipt (at once an archaism of “recipe” — a series of instructions yielding culinary achievement — and the more familiar evidence of a transactional moment) heralds the crackling word-play found throughout Anderson’s verse; apparently guileless cookery terms — toast, coat, grill, icing — constellate meaning into moments mysterious and resonant, and lines course from mordantly witty to heart-tuggingly melancholic in an instant. Anderson’s domestic realm links the anxiety of cooking sugar to worrying a stock-ticker; witnesses the cosmos in a pizza gone awry; mines the proximities of corn fungus and soft-core. To read these poems is its own kind of nutrition, its own sustenance, and you turn the final page of this volume thrillingly filled.” —Ted Lee, author of The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook "Karen Leona Anderson doesn't miss a beat as she traces our consumerisms—economic, sexual, spiritual, and more—with irony, wit, sadness and more than a little humor. Receipt is, quite simply, a terrific book." —Linda Bierds |
|
BUY RECEIPT
Buy at Milkweed Editions Buy at Amazon Buy at IndieBound Five Poems, Terrain.org, May 2015. Featuring poems published in the Best American Poetry, New American Writing, Colorado Review, and other journals. Read “Company,” Academy of American Poets, Poem-A-Day, March 2014 Read “Starlings,” Colorado Review, Fall 2013. Read “Asparagus,” “Rhubarb,” and “Pizza Night” Delaware Poetry Review. Spring 2013. |