Marie Gauthier

This year Susan Rich is curating the Big Poetry Giveaway, founded by Kelli Russell Agodon a few years back. Check out Susan’s blog for the guidelines, and to see the growing list of participants. In my usual fashion, instead of books I’ll be giving away subscriptions {Edit: AND ONE BOOK!}. But first:

Where have I been? I’ve written a little, cooked a lot (oatmeal bread, chocolate cake, Cornish pasty-pie, granola, orange poppyseed muffins, and rhubarb jam, all just this week). I’ve worked (AWP! I went! With Georgia! Which meant I didn’t have that much flexibility in attending events, and missed seeing a number of folks, but I did get a dinner out with Sandy Longhorn which more than made up for everything else!) (and have you checked out Tupelo’s 30/30 Project yet?) and mothered, and we’ve managed to get through late winter without any big ailments, a minor miracle I don’t altogether trust, not least since I’ve gone and recklessly said it out loud.

Time is slippery. A wriggling fish flying out of my hands. In my mind it’s still September. Or earlier even, before my mom got sick. Saturday was the two year anniversary of her death, and what’s remarkable is how very much that two years feels like nothing. Which likely explains my cooking mania.

“Then the question is: How do you fall in love with [cooking] again, or if it has never made you truly happy, fall in love with it for the first time?

My answer is to anchor food somewhere deep inside you, or deep in the wonders of what you love.

We have different loves. Mine are food and words. Others’ are how building slant away from dark sidewalks, or how good it feels to solve an equation. I say: Let yourself love what you love, and see if it doesn’t lead you back to what you ate when you loved it.” — from An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace by Tamar Adler

I can hear my mom’s voice when I cook, know exactly how she’d feel about each food I make, can fully imagine the conversation surrounding each process. To cook is to commune with her. To cook is to lead me back to her.

Anyway, though I’ve been absent I haven’t been idle.

Thank you for sticking with me through it all. To be entered into my Big Poetry Giveaway, please leave a comment on this post. At the end of the month I’ll use the Random Number Generator to choose winners. The 5 prizes are a 1-yr. subscription each to:

• Cave Wall
• Sugar House Review
• burntdistrict
• Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review

AND, I’m giving away a copy of Myrrh, Mothwing, Smoke: Erotic Poems, the new anthology I edited with Jeffrey, which includes poems by wonderful poet friends  Amy Dryansky, Molly Spencer, and others. So that’s FIVE (5) PRIZES. 

Thanks for playing. And don’t forget to visit Susan’s blog for the full list of other participants — there’s a lot more poetry up for grabs!