Essay-Review of Cooking with the Muse in Pirene’s Fountain literary journal

by Linda Kim

CLICK HERE to find the rest of the article excerpted from below and the plethora of related poems and other pieces in the “Silk and Spice” issue of  Pirene’s Fountain.

“As a cookbook for poets and a poetry book for cooks, Cooking with the Muse is both a culinary and a literary triumph. Myra Kornfeld and Stephen Massimilla make their collaborative efforts accessible and enjoyable for everyone…By inspiring generations of poets, food has created a timeless dialogue of veneration in which the poets of one age go on to impact the next… Kornfeld crafts delicious seasonal recipes…[and] promotes health stem[ming] from her deep devotion to chasing the freshest and most local of ingredients… Both wholly original and a remix of the old, Massimilla’s poetry pays homage to archaic styles and invocations; what had inspired the great, the ancient, the aged now inspires him… His diction and syntax, prosody and rhythm, reveal a deep appreciation for the progression of poetry. …Something is lost with industrialized agriculture. Kornfeld and Massimilla aim to bring us back to our roots.”