Then Eat My Love

"There are no measures too small to take for the heart. We do what we can to keep it afloat," writes Ann Iverson in this series of elegies to parents, sisters, a former husband, landscapes real or imagined, and the dizzy beauty of lives lived when we are younger than young. Iverson is a poet, and her prose is studded with the surprise of the accurate detail and the jolt of the compressed image: "the deception in graveyards," "the churchless winter," the Oklahoma grass, "brittle hair after a cheap permanent wave." Read these essays once for the worlds that will open - vivid and suddenly known - and a second time for "the sound of the heart...here I am." - Patricia Weaver Francisco - author of Telling Then Eat My Love, a delicious collection of essays, is about okra and Swiss watches, about loving and letting go, but mostly about family. The stories are delectable tidbits from a full and heartfelt life. I enjoyed every bite. - Mary Logue - author of The Streel and The Big Sugar.

Then Eat My Love is a small gem of an essay collection that portrays, with vivid granularity, the joys and sorrows of family, love and loss. Ann Iverson creates living, breathing characters who take life in these essays and will remain with the reader. - Lawrence Sutin - author of A Postcard Memoir and Jack and Rochelle: A Story of Love and Resistance