POETICS: Grain

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POETICS: Grain follows a single seed's long passage into bread, and asks what poetry might learn along the way. This volume gathers voices who know wheat and rice, harvest and hunger, the daily loaf and the loaf of feast, tracing grain from the patience of soil to the shared table.

From the manna gathered by the Hebrews in the wilderness to Demeter's barren, grieving fields, grain has always been where cultures store memory alongside food. The earliest writing on clay tablets was an accounting of bushels. Aristotle called poetry mimesis, imitation, and the farmer may be its oldest teacher. The poet, like the farmer, editor Tamarah Rockwood writes, does not invent her materials. She finds them, and she works them into something the body can use.

Rockwood has curated nearly ninety poems from poets, farmers, bakers, priests, and mourners, organized into four movements that follow grain's own journey: Field, Harvest, Bread, and Communion. The collection moves from Van Gogh's wheatfields and prairie silos, through threshing floors and mills, into kitchens where dough rises under a lightbulb's warmth, and finally to the table, where bread is broken, memory passes hand to hand, and, as the book's epigraph from Ursula K. Le Guin reminds us, love is "remade all the time, made new."

Dedicated to the men and women of the world who labor and toil to feed our bodies and our imaginations, POETICS: Grain is a collection about patience, inheritance, and the smallest unit of attention any of us can name.