# Kitchen Apocrypha: Poems - Hardcover

by **Gregory Emilio** (Author)

Gregory Emilio's _Kitchen Apocrypha_ delves richly and sensuously into food as sustenance, ritual, pleasure, and temptation. Drawing upon his food service experiences, Emilio contemplates hunger, abundance, community, and solitude through the lens of culinary arts. He navigates meals ranging from sacred family recipes to unassuming roadside diners, sprinkling biblical and mythological allusions throughout. Central to his narrative is a deep reverence for food's power to nourish not just the body, but the spirit and human connection as well. A finalist for the 2021 Able Muse Book Award, _Kitchen Apocrypha_ offers a feast both earthy and sublime.

  

**PRAISE FOR _KITCHEN APOCRYPHA_:**

  

A poet is a professor of the five senses, Lorca taught us. Gregory Emilio understands this beautifully. There are prayers here and songs of wonder, there is a communal voice and one of solitude. There is elegy and rhapsody. This book is alive. As Emilio writes in one unforgettable page (a cento!): "Saint Anthony, patron of sausage makers, / guide my pen and unkink my tongue. I sing / of a hog theater where hogs performed as men." Gorgeous, surprising work.

\- Ilya Kaminsky, author of _Deaf Republic_

  

The fact that food, like sex, mediates for us with death provides the guiding metaphor for Gregory Emilio's ingenious book _Kitchen Apocrypha_, which might equally well be titled _Kitchen Epiphany_. Beginning with a delightful amatory /gustatory rewrite of Yeats's "Leda and the Swan" ("we stumbled out of the bedroom, dizzy / and undone, rapt and abandoned: hungry"), this collection riffs on many foodstuffs, spinning through poetic forms as it does so. It examines food service as well as food; it examines anorexia as well as satiety. The elemental fire by which food becomes food is felt also as the Paradise (California) wildfire, for the contents and activities of the kitchen, Emilio suggests, are a way of understanding the world. The true hospitality here is not an industry but a sacred duty to the stranger (to the reader), what the Greeks call xenia. This book is good company.

\- Karl Kirchwey, author of _Stumbling Blocks_

  

Though Jesus assured us that we could not live by bread alone, still manna from heaven manifested itself as bread, and the eucharist is a meal of bread and wine. Food is both literal and metaphorical. The poetry in _Kitchen Apocrypha_, about the preparation and consumption and worship of food, is a cuisine of muchness and plenty, and delicious in the richness of its vocabulary and invention. By the end of the book, you may feel stuffed, but you'll want more.

\- Mark Jarman, author of _The Heronry_

  

**ABOUT THE AUTHOR:**

  

Gregory Emilio is a poet and food writer from southern California. His poems and essays have appeared in _Best New Poets_, _Gastronomica_, _North American Review_, _\[PANK\]_, the _Rumpus_, _Tupelo Quarterly_, and _Southern Humanities Review_. He holds an MFA from the University of California Riverside, and a PhD in English from Georgia State University. A mean home cook and avid cyclist, he lives in Atlanta and teaches at Kennesaw State University.

  

**Number of Pages:** 96

**Dimensions:** 0.38 x 9 x 6 IN

**Illustrated:** Yes

**Publication Date:** April 12, 2024

## Details

- **Price:** 32.35 USD
- **Vendor:** Books by splitShops
- **Type:** Books
- **Tags:** Books by splitShops, Shopify Collective

## Variants

| Variant | Price | Available |
|---------|-------|-----------|
| Default Title | 32.35 USD | In stock |

## Images

- Kitchen Apocrypha: Poems - Hardcover

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