BEFORE THE DESIRE TO EAT

<p class=ql-align-justify>When food is rich it is saturated-in butter or in sugar but also in nutrients. R. Stempel's <em>Before the Desire to Eat </em>is rich in all of these ways: lush with an edge charged with verdant growth flourishing under a petri dish sky. Snort fabric softener with Stempel & get high on bananas that taste like nail polish as they delight in alliteration and repetition in the exchange between domesticity microbiology and the body. Rot won't shatter Stempel writes rot / does shield. These poems feel good in the mouth.</p><p class=ql-align-justify><strong>-S. Brook Corfman</strong> author of <em>My Daily Actions</em> or <em>The Meteorites </em>(Fordham University </p><p class=ql-align-justify>Press 2020) and <em>Luxury Blue Lace</em> (Autumn House 2019)</p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify>Arguably you will fall in love with these poems beauties all as their author declares: <em>Arguably I'm in love / with all my friends. It feels sneaky // when I arms widened perform / palatial baiting // my beauties under guise / of something less carnal.</em> In this farm-to-table recipe book for dismantling the patriarchy and the matriarchy R. Stempel is an impeccable guide to what is edible what is permissible and what is impermissibly alluring. Early on we learn there are too many bird metaphors. Stempel's complex verse makes us believe and also take with a grain of salt plus vinegar and some other condiments all the voices in <em>BEFORE THE DESIRE TO EAT</em>. Emily Dickinson's Angle-Worm-eating Bird would feel right at home coming down the Walk of this book. It's got raw fellows convenient Dew Velvet Heads cautious Crumb and plenty of eros.</p><p class=ql-align-justify><strong>-Judith Baumel</strong> author of <em>The Weight of Numbers </em>(Wesleyan Poetry Series 1988)<em> </em></p><p class=ql-align-justify><em>Now</em> (University of Miami Press 1996) <em>The Kangaroo Girl </em>(GenPop Books 2011) and </p><p class=ql-align-justify><em>Passeggiate</em> (Arrowsmith Press 2019)</p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify>These poems have mukbang energy: they're gross lusty indulgent and hard to unsee. And like those videos Stempel's poems are a new kind of art. In their crooked clarity a pomegranate has a crowned nipple-stem concealing a cellulose jungle-gym and bananas taste like nail polish. Elsewhere on the menu: bone broth gummy worms kombucha vinegar pork shoulder gefilte fish black grapes a six-hour goulash and-why not-a talking pig caked in flour. Stempel's poems feel mid-theft as if the reader were walking in on the poet with one hand in the cookie jar. It's no accident: these poems announce themselves as neither fit nor proper-they take place inside that moment before the desire to eat when everything is both edible and indelible.</p><p class=ql-align-justify><strong>-Jan-Henry Gray</strong> author of<em> Documents</em> (Winner of the BOA Editions' 2018 A. Poulin </p><p class=ql-align-justify>Jr. Poetry Prize) and the chapbook <em>Selected Emails </em>(speCt! Books)</p><p><br></p><p><br></p><p><br></p>