lemon, egg, bread

Laura Elliott

lemon, egg, bread is a striking first collection; a series of poems which read as an attempt to speed-write the still-life image. Drawn out of a process of meditation on and intervention within various still-life compositions, including works by Laura Letinsky, the collection explores practices of re-articulation by way of the feminist gaze and the gut.

These are direct, imagistic poems formed purely from appetite; a compendium of metabolisms. Bound within sites of both domestic and intellectual labour, the poems narrate the idiosyncratic rituals surrounding food preparation, consumption, and observation.

The vocabulary of the vanitas is here reconfigured via a poetics of devouring, which focuses on the liminal, the leftover, and the wasted. The subject speaks in and through the objects of digestion of the still life, mapping interrelations of celebration and shame, desire and rage, inscribing the most complex and fleeting of hungers.