Product Description

Lockward explores the feminine mystique in her second full-length collection of sensual and imaginative poems. As they consider the various ways in which we are nourished or not nourished, these poems are, as Kim Addonizio said of Lockward's previous collection, Eve's Red Dress, "irreverent, ravenous for the world, and unabashedly female."

Winner of the Quentin R. Howard Poetry Prize

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #428017 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-15
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 100 pages

From the Inside Flap
In this brimming collection Diane Lockward's considerable wit engages both what is askew and awry and what to a lesser eye might seem to be standing up straight. She never takes you where you expect to go--that is part of her talent and her sassy wisdom. She is an original and a delight.
---Baron Wormser

What Feeds Us is sometimes humorous and sometimes heartbreaking. Diane Lockward's language is both plain-spoken and rich, lush. This is a wonderful book that might not nourish your body but certainly will nourish your heart.
---Thomas Lux

In these sparkling poems, Diane Lockward takes life as it comes and finds nourishment in it all: succulence of the peach, redolence of the pear, the "green grape of sorrow." I love these poems for their craft, sensuality and energy. Like high-wire acts of language and imagination, they almost leap in the air and come down again on the wire, balancing between witty and dark, personal and invented, idea and emotion.
---Patricia Fargnoli

About the Author
Diane Lockward is the author of two previous collections, Eve's Red Dress (Wind Publications, 2003) and a chapbook, Against Perfection (Poets Forum Press, 1998). Her poems have been published in several anthologies, including Poetry Daily: 366 Poems from the World's Most Popular Poetry Website and Garrison Keillor's Good Poems for Hard Times. Her poems have appeared in such journals as The Beloit Poetry Journal, Spoon River Poetry Review, Ascent, Poet Lore, Fulcrum, and Prairie Schooner. Her work has also been featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, and read by Garrison Keillor on NPR's The Writer's Almanac.

Customer Reviews

A Wonderful Read
Diane Lockward's What Feeds Us, feeds us with the far sides of human experience and all that falls between. There are poems that are deeply sad, poems that are wry, and poems that are celebratory, almost reverential.

I especially admire that way Diane handles deep sadness. She comes at her subjects from the side. In her poem, "The Gift", she is offering someone, presumably the father, a mechanical boy, seventeen, a new son.: "This boy can't get into trouble .../ He'll last forever./ This boy's durable./ This boy won't break.". In the poem, "The First Artichoke", the poem takes a sudden turn from description of a family gathering, to a conflation of the artichoke and the father's leaving, "Piece by piece the artichoke came apart, /the way we did in 1959, the year the flowerbuds/ of the artichokes in my father's garden bloomed/ without him".

And her gift for simile. In her poem "Verga", which is snow that melts before it hits the ground, she compares this phenomenon to "the heart grieving without tears./ Something like a hand frozen/ in a photograph,/ a hand forever waving/ goodbye".

What I like most in this collection is the wonderful mixture of joy and sorrow. There are poems that make us laugh like "The Shampoo Artist": A Really Dramatic Monologue", "For this hour, you're my Galatea./ Lean back while I lather you ..." and "The Tomato Envies the Peach". And there are poems that are tender and sensual like "Wren House" and "His Two Arms". After reading What Feeds Us, I felt full.

Food for Thought
"Sometimes I lay down on the floor and let worms/crawl over my belly" - Diane Lockward pulls us into the details of our living world and how we are changed by it. She finds music in all language and artfully explores the way words taste in the mouth. A deft and careful poet, Diane Lockward's What Feeds Us is a must read.

Brief, free-verse poems that embraces all forms of nourishment in life itself.
Winner of the Quentin R. Howard Poetry Prize 2006, What Feeds Us is former high school English teacher Diane Lockward's latest collection of brief, free-verse poems that embraces all forms of nourishment in life itself. From a petulant, invective poem against bumblebees to enjoying and celebrating the pleasure of an anniversary to the haunting analogy between creating a house for wrens to nest in and trying to become pregnant, What Feeds Us paints sublimely with descriptive language, sometimes plain-spoken, sometimes obliquely surreptitious. "Reconstruction": I am a house he would move into, / so framed for this man. With hammer / and nails he holds me together, / such tools he carries, his pliers, his adze, / gives me his awl, his drill and bits. / He puts a roof over my head. / I am shingled and waterproofed, / plumbed, mitered, and wired. He makes / of me a dream house, a cream puff, / my rough-hewn timber smoothed. / Broom-clean, in move-in condition. / I am two-storied now. He builds a fire in me.