"Deft and insightful." --WASHINGTON POST
In her "resonant and witty" (Washington Post) second collection, Karen
Leona Anderson transforms apparently prosaic documents--recipes and
receipts--into expressions of human identity. From eighteenth-century
cookbooks to the Food Network, the recipe becomes a site for definition
and disclosure. In these poems, the pie is a cultural artifact and Betty
Crocker, icon of domesticity, looms large. And like a theatrical script,
the recipe directs action and conjures characters: Grace Kelly at a
party. Shoppers at a postapocalyptic mall. From the little black dress
($49.99 at Nordstrom) to an epidural ($25.00 co-pay), Anderson reveals
life in the twenty-first century to be equally hampered and enabled by
expenditures. Amidst personal and domestic economies, wildness
proliferates--bats, deer, ocelots, and fungus--reminding the reader that
not all can be assimilated, eaten, or spent.
Receipt is like the lovechild of Anne Sexton and Adam Smith,
illuminating the ways in which our lives are both constrained by pieces
of paper, and able to slip through the crevices of cultural detritus
down to the rich current of animal feeling beneath.
