TO ADD TO YOUR READING LIST

The Intimacy of Spoons explores the many metaphors of the spoon: from love and marriage to the spoon of a grave that holds our bodies; from the darkness of loss and night, where “the Big Dipper is nothing but / the oldest spoon pointing us home”; to the darkness of lungs transformed into art. The poems cover a wide variety of topics—cultural, political, familial, and natural—and always, underlying these poems is the song of birds—with broken wings or clear voices, avian muses filling our forests now or long gone. There are nods to Basho and Thoreau, to Eliot and Frost, Dickinson and Milton, this last, a long poem that retells the story of Adam and Eve from the point of view of Mal, the apple. Likewise, The Intimacy of Spoons shares a variety of forms, from sonnet, sestina, and villanelle to syllabics, lyrics, and a ballad. At the center of the book is the long poem, “Elegy for My Body,” which uses wordplay and contrasting voices to explore mortality, because “You can’t really do time; / it simply does us, / or undoes us, / us beings in the time being being beings / on Times Squared / waiting for the big ball to fall.” The poems of The Intimacy of Spoons return us to everyday stories and objects, common yet profound.

MADVILLE PUBLISHING seeks out and encourages literary writers with unique voices. We look for writers who express complex ideas in simple terms. We look for critical thinkers with a twang, a lilt, or a click in their voices. And patois! We love a good patois. We want to hear those regionalisms in our writers’ voices. We want to preserve the sound of our histories through our voices complete and honest, dialectal features and all. We want to highlight those features that make our cultures special in ways that do not focus on division, but rather shine an appreciative light on our diversity.