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Hello, and welcome to this week's newsletter,
This week, we're exploring the poetry of food. In many ways, poetry and food are parallel forms of sustenance: they nourish us, comfort us, engage the senses, and create moments of connection. As poet Dorothy Chan writes in her article What Does Food Have to Do with Poetry?, “A great poem, like a great meal, leaves you full and happy.” Both can be deeply personal yet profoundly communal, entwined with our memories, families, and cultures.
For centuries, poets have turned to food as both subject and metaphor, using it to explore love, identity, belonging, and loss. A meal, an ingredient, or a shared ritual can become a doorway into the stories that shape us. In Blackberry-Picking, Seamus Heaney transforms the simple act of gathering fruit into something almost sacred: “You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet / Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it.” In Perhaps the World Ends Here, Joy Harjo reminds us that so much of life unfolds around the kitchen table: “Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.”
Food sustains us physically, but it also nourishes our emotional and imaginative lives. The meals we cook, share, and remember become vessels for memory - carrying family histories, traditions, and moments of connection. Every recipe holds traces of the people and places that shaped it.
Books and poems do something similar. They preserve voices, cultures, and histories, passing stories between generations and inviting us into experiences beyond our own. Like a treasured family recipe, they gather new meaning each time they are shared.
 It feels fitting, then, that our August Book of the Month is Eating Air by Suyin Du Bois. This remarkable debut pamphlet is a mouth-watering collection of poems about food, belonging, and connection. Travelling across cuisines, continents, and generations, Du Bois explores her Chinese-Malaysian and Belgian heritage, revealing how the meals we make, share, and remember become inseparable from our identities. Rich with sensory detail and emotional insight, Eating Air reminds us that every dish carries a story, and that food can be a vessel for love, memory, and home.
We've also gathered some of our favourite poetry and non-fiction books celebrating the poetics of food. We hope you'll discover something delicious to read in our Bookshop.org collection below.
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