Poet Martha Ronk notes that it is not so much that she finds food displeasurable, but that she finds the sitting at the table unpleasant. Food, moreover, is associated with roles that many woman question. Accordingly, the very process of writing about it becomes a sort of dialogue between society and between eating and reading, “a wrestling with dough or syntax, being at the table or under it.” Ronk’s startlingly fresh and often comic wrestling with food is a remarkable tour de force as she takes the reader through lemons, frozen hotdogs, oranges, raw eggs, artichokes, basil, red pepper strips, snails, rice, tortillas, milktoast, cottage cheese, and many other products of the kitchen.

Author of State of Mind, Eyetrouble, Desert Geometries and other works, Ronk lives in Los Angeles, where she also teaches at Occidental College. Robert Haas has written of her work: “The impulse of a lot of contemporary experimental poetry, of the postmodernists, is to abrade language, to roughen it, to make you look twice rather than to look though it as if it were clear glass. It demands reading, and reminds me of what Toni Morrison is reported to have said when Oprah Winfrey asked her what she’d tell readers who complained that they had to go over her sentences three or four times. Morrison said: ‘I’d tell them it’s called reading, honey.’ …You will have your fractured, postmodern Renaissance summer moon [in this work], and it seems right for Southern California.”