In Eat Joy, Natalie Eve Garrett collects short essays by 31 different writers, each with a recipe linked to it. The writers capture similar relationships to food that Cisneros and I have, where food goes deeper than simple nourishment. “When I embarked on this collection,” Garrett writes, “I hoped to create a feast of stories about making mistakes, summoning strength, getting lost and trying to find a way back. I hungered for compassionate stories that reveled in taste, whether savory, bitter, or sweet—stories that used food as a conduit for unearthing memories.” The essays reveal how foods hold the shape of memories and people and places, nourishment intertwined with the forces that shaped it.
Why do we include the sounds of words in our thoughts when we think without speaking? Are they just an illusion induced by our memory of overt speech?
These questions have long pointed to a mystery, one relevant to our endeavor to identify impossible languages — that is, languages that cannot take root in the human brain.
Like many businesses in Japan, her family’s shop, Ichiwa, takes the long view — albeit longer than most. By putting tradition and stability over profit and growth, Ichiwa has weathered wars, plagues, natural disasters, and the rise and fall of empires. Through it all, its rice flour cakes have remained the same.
Why hasn’t there been more innovation in transportation? Why is the 21st century street still being trod by 19th century vehicles? The pandemic gave the world a pause, the sort capable of disrupting entrenched habits—Zoom changed our notions of social connectivity almost overnight. Had a similar glitch in the matrix allowed us the temporary means to envision better—safer, cleaner, quieter, more efficient—ways to move around?
A 1.5-generation Korean American living in St. Louis, such as myself, will most likely never realize the fact that they’re living near the 38th parallel north until they come across DMZ Colony, the latest collection of poems by the poet-translator Don Mee Choi, whose opening section takes place in St. Louis. Snow geese say to Choi, “SEE YOU AT DMZ,” flying over Forest Park in formation for three pages, figures in the distant canvas of the sky. Choi has replaced the geese with letters, as though the letters were stick figures representing the geese: Ds on the first page, Ms on the second page, Zs on the third page.
Ron Charles, Washington Post
Again and again, with the raw elements of this cramped life, Gallen manages to evoke in us a wave of complex feelings. It’s the kind of magic you’ll feel lucky to find.
Every cell in our bodies contains a pore
like a door, which says when to let in