Tasted by Marion Brown

“Food as metaphor for desire, the body, the daily satisfactions of what sustains us. The appetites as oracles. With a light, oblique touch Marion Brown offers us a taste of a life well-lived, captured here in exquisitely crafted poems.”
–Kurt Brown

“In Marion Brown’s taut and tasty first collection, poems simmer with desire both examined and met. Apricots are “tongued by time,” and islands of pepper “raise the gluey lining” of the throat in a highbrow kitchen vernacular frequently spiked with French. The poet delicately asks the reader to “Whisper me back to marmalade,/ where I lived in dessert time,/citrus and sweet,” and alternately, wryly, suggests: “Rhythm,/like sex, speeds your/heartbeat and takes you. Sex,/though, can’t really be tasted while/driving.” Tasted offers readers a fresh, sophisticated voice sounding out a forty-year marriage, a life of the mind and the body in the shapeliest of stanzas. These poems are immediate, intelligent, and arresting.”
–Elaine Sexton, author of Causeway

Rating:  ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]