The Patron Saint of Cauliflower

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Review Praise for THE PATRON SAINT OF CAULIFLOWER How to prepare for the end of the world except by trying to feed the world? In The Patron Saint of Cauliflower, Elizabeth Cohen gives us poems that nourish the starving soul, recipes and spells and odes in praise of what sustains us, even against the gravest odds: food and love and the imagination, itself. She turns her passion for the physical world –– plant, animal and human –– into magic, metaphor and music here. The children of Aleppo are eating grass, but they have also trained themselves, in her reckoning, “to hear the sound of sunshine/on broken glass.” ––Cecilia Woloch, author of Earth andTzigan Elizabeth Cohen just became one of my favorite contemporary poets. These poems are fusions of poetic craft and canny wisdom. I'd say "cunning," but there is nothing elusive about the poems: they come straight at you. The speaker is so real that you sense how language can reckon with the present. These poems won't leave you lonely.  On the contrary, you'll feel sustained and inspired long after the poet has thrown down the mic. I don't think we've had a poet since Roethke who can draw so effortlessly on her poetic palette, or one since Rilke whose ink feels so alive on the page. I am grateful to be able to hold in my hands a work of unsinkable wisdom, spirit, humor and love. In Whitman's words, “All things please the soul, but these please the soul well.” ––Jerry Mirskin, author of Crepuscular Non-Drivewayand Picture a Gate Hanging Open and Let that Gate be the Sun Before there was LITERATURE, lyric poems were charms, spells to make love happen, curse, alter weather, protect children, heal, provide safe passage into other worlds. The poems in this collection are potions conveying an old magic, spells that Elizabeth Cohen casts that conjure beauty in its detail and oddness, in its tragic and joyful embodiments.What are the secret ingredients these poems contain? Something beyond technical skill, but including it. Something the reader discovers inside. ––Stuart Bartow, author of Questions for the Sphinxand Einstein's Lawn Fair warning, dear reader, dear reader with food cravings, with recipes and no one to cook them or cook for but your own flawed self, with heartbreakingly busy appetites, with a love for the grains and strains of this world so fierce you're ready to eat these poems. Fair warning. Elizabeth Cohen's cabbages and figs, cauliflower and cakes, starvation and salt, will fill your mouth and stir your soul. These poems will trip on your tongue as you eat them out loud. They'll stick to your heart like love, like the tremendous love that went into crafting them, like the love that concocted us all. ––Janet Kaplan, author of Dreamlife of a Philanthropist and Ecotones, forthcoming in 2019 from Eyewear Ltd! In elegant, candid, raffish poems (about food but also about everything) Elizabeth Cohen again shows us how poems can be loci for ardent life. Her unmistakable voice is confiding and intimate--and her extraordinary charm is to seem offhand and yet, with invisible art, to have made every line true. ––April Bernard, author of  Miss Fuller: A Novel  and Romanticism: Poems Read more