The Book Eaters

Winner of the 2023 Perugia Press Prize, featured in Poets & Writers Magazine‘s 2024 Debut Poets issue

Awards

Nebraska Book Award Poetry Honor Category, winner

Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award, honorable mention

Eric Hoffer Book Award Poetry Category, finalist

Housatonic Book Award, finalist

Poetry by the Sea Book Award, finalist

Reading the West Award, shortlisted

Order The Book Eaters

The Book Eaters at Perugia Press, Asterism, and Amazon.

Poems from the book:

PARTITION

In your version of the story, people butter their fingers 
with notions of God, splitting India into a smaller India, 
a new Pakistan. The way a single roti’s dough 
is pulled apart, the new spheres, rolled in the palms, 
then flattened. The idea of God—the destroyer of human bonds, 
you will say—the reason for new borders, new
pain to sprout on either side of a dividing line. 
You’ll go on. I’ll picture the edges of your words blurring 
to a hum as I think of how to wrest your rant from you. 
A rolling pin barrels over dough, widens the soft disk, 
makes it fine. You are fragile. Like a story that stretches 
belief. Like a nation. Like a thin disk of dough that sticks 
to a surface, tearing when it’s peeled back. I don’t know 
how to part the story from the person and keep the person.

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ORDER OF OPERATIONS

You try to follow your father’s dictum:
Stay ahead; cover next week’s chapter in algebra
now, so when the teacher delivers the lesson
in the future, the future will be a memory
for you—the word problem you’ve already 
solved. A family travels in a train at a velocity
X miles per hour greater than a car. From inside
the train, the car seems to slip slowly backward
like salmon swimming against the current
to spawn. But you are not chasing time
to make life. As you speed through the weeks
to the destination, you try to quantify the benefit
of an earlier arrival. You need to know why,
in the textbook of your life, the order of operations
insists that you cry for your father before he dies,
so when he dies, you are prepared. You’ll live
in the memory of pain, which is not pain.
It’s a family moving forward on a train.

__________________________________________________________________

IN THE BEGINNING

As the baby pulled the cold air into her lungs,
I saw a nurse take her tiny foot,
press it into a pad of blue ink

and write with her body

her body

as if my baby were, at once,
the pen and the word.

__________________________________________________________________

Order The Book Eaters at Perugia Press, Asterism, and Amazon.