Before the Desire to Eat

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)