by Scott Hightower
To read the full piece on the Five Points website, click here:

COOKING WITH THE MUSE:A Sumptuous Gathering of Seasonal Recipes, Culinary Poetry, and Literary Fare, Myra Kornfeld and Stephen Massimilla, Tupelo Press, 2016, 978-1-936797-68-4, $39.95

DARK AS A HAZEL EYE:Coffee & Chocolate Poems, Ellen Foos, Vasiliki Katsarou, Lynne Shapiro, Ragged Sky Press, 2016, 978-1-933974-18-7, $15

FEAST, Diane Goettel and Anneli Matheson, Black Lawrence Press, 2015,

978-1-62557-907-2, 16.95

THE INCLUSIVE TABLE: The Eye, The Ear, The Stomach, The Human Imagination

Anyone with a grandmother’s or mother’s cookbook overflowing with yellowing newspaper clippings, archaic product recipes, and ancient illustrated pamphlets of cooking techniques and presentations knows that bounty can amount to a celebration of culture. Recipes and poems share an incantatory past. Both have an oral and a written cultural valence…which is to say, a literary dimension.

Back in 1991 Raymond Sokolov’s Why We Eat What We Eatbuilt on Auden’s notion that–more than “The Atomic Age”–we are living, perhaps more appropriately, in “The Golden Age of Cuisine.” Sokolov’s book was primarily history—melding the pre- and post-Columbian worlds. In 2009, Anthony Chiffolo and Rayner Hess co-authored and served up their glossy photograph- enhanced Cooking With The Bibleand in 2010 Cooking with the Movies.

This season we are showered with more plentitude! Three books—each seductive and vertiginous in its own way—are notable additions to the shelf.

COOKING WITH THE MUSEis the most glamorous of the three.

It is a large (500-page) carefully indexed tome offering 150 exciting international recipes; a plethora of poems about ingredients, dishes, cooking and eating; essays about poems; culinary and historical notes; and 200 full-color photographs: a delectable feast of words and images. The book is divided into seasons and is easy to follow, with attention to when each ingredient comes into its own. “Cook’s Notes” (Kornfeld?) and “Poet’s Notes” (Massimilla?) salt and pepper the volume. Of eating a plum, Massimilla writes:

Black horses have a deep blue tint

to their eyes;

in the plum-dark night…

I would bite

into this sweet, cool planet, red coal

within, right down

to the hard grooved stone

through flesh as dense

as the gallop of blood in the lungs, pulse

of the heart

within the heart, here under fetlock

and throat-latch of the Horsehead

Nebula—celestial, sanguinary,

all thirst and murmur….

(“Plum Summer”)