Pantry Tapa blanda - 2014

The poems in Pantry take their titles from kitchen objects. Some are common to most kitchens, like dishwashers and double boilers, and others are less common, like pie birds and olive pitters. The poems are not literally about these objects. Rather, the objects, or some aspect of them a shape, a use, some minute detail are landmarks in an interior domestic landscape. And few domestic landscapes are more interior than the pantry, a place where objects are laid aside for later use, sometimes years later or not at all. These are the things we hold on to, forget, and discover again. They are the things underlying our material lives. The poems in this book begin here, in the closely packed pantry, but then slip beneath the material objects to explore the domestic lives that spark, seethe, and sometimes explode around them.