$14.99
When food is rich, it is saturated—in butter or in sugar, but also in nutrients. R. Stempel’s Before the Desire to Eat 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.
–S. Brook Corfman, author of My Daily Actions, or The Meteorites (Fordham University Press, 2020) and Luxury, Blue Lace (Autumn House, 2019)
Arguably, you will fall in love with these poems, beauties all, as their author declares
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.
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 BEFORE THE DESIRE TO EAT. 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.
–Judith Baumel, author of The Weight of Numbers (Wesleyan Poetry Series, 1988), Now (University of Miami Press, 1996), The Kangaroo Girl (GenPop Books, 2011), and Passeggiate (Arrowsmith Press, 2019)
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.
–Jan-Henry Gray, author of Documents (Winner of the BOA Editions’ 2018 A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize) and the chapbook, Selected Emails (speCt! Books)
BEFORE THE DESIRE TO EAT
by R. Stempel
$14.99, paper
978-1-64662-787-5
2022
R. Stempel is a genderqueer Ukrainian-Jewish poet and PhD candidate in English at SUNY-Binghamton University. They are the author of the chapbook Interiors, winner of the 2021 Wallace Award from Foundlings Press, and their work has appeared in Porter House Review, Hypertext Magazine, Penn Review, and elsewhere. They currently live in New York with their rabbit, Diego.
Sophia Tarin –
Can poetry leave you salivating?! Before the Desire to Eat is essential reading and lives rent free on my kitchen counter! The poems are brimming with lust and hunger for bodies, carcasses, food, and garbage. It asks us to consider what we hunger for and is it edible.
Ashley Hajimirsadeghi –
Can always count on R. Stempel to deliver a set of poems that manages to satisfy a certain craving in poetry that I always want to see, but am unable to manifest when reading other poems. Being a human isn’t always a pretty & aesthetic thing, which is the concept I think these poems truly captures the essence of.
Sean Wai Keung –
“so for lunch I use my father’s credit card to buy gummy worms & kombucha” from ‘Ode To Crock-Pot’. These poems use different food-languages to explore connections between people, family, nature, economics, classes and cultures. At the same time, the language often overtly points towards the inherit absurdity in many of these connection-attempts. R. Stempel showcases a great variety of styles and forms throughout these poems and as such every page feels exciting and electric. A great read.
Brandon Noel Mendez –
Disgusts and enchants… twisted, wry hilarity and humility. A shocking and amusing dish, with sharp moments of modern life and ironic fantasy that fall into place during the digestion of this short, concerning surge of conversation topics at the dinner table.
Lilia Marie Ellis –
R. Stempel’s poems display a remarkable range and inventiveness, alongside a depth and precision of language that consistently amazes. These are poems of feeling and cleverness, written with great care and tension. They reward pondering and rereading. An excellent collection.