The More Extravagant Feast

by Leah Naomi Green

Overview

* One of the Boston Globe's Best Books of 2020 *

Winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, selected by Li-Young Lee

The More Extravagant Feast focuses on the trophic exchanges of a human body with the world via pregnancy, motherhood, and interconnection—the acts of making and sustaining other bodies from one’s own, and one’s own from the larger world. Leah Naomi Green writes from attentiveness to the vast availability and capacity of the weedy, fecund earth and from her own human place within more-than-human life, death, and birth. Lyrically and spiritually rich, striving toward honesty and understanding, The More Extravagant Feast is an extraordinary book of awareness of our dependency on ecological systems—seen and unseen.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644450185
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	04/07/2020
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Leah Naomi Green is the author of The Ones We Have, winner of the Flying Trout Press Chapbook Prize. She teaches English and environmental studies at Washington and Lee University and lives in an ecological intentional community in Virginia.

Table of Contents

I Seed and Fugue

Field Guide to the Chaparral 5

Venison 7

C-Section 8

Seed and Fugue 10

Week Five: Measure 11

Week Twelve: Taproot 13

Relativity 15

Week Thirty-Eight: Mitosis 17

In Cleaning 19

Arrival 20

II River and Fugue

Narration, Transubstantiation 25

Night Weaning 27

To the Cardinal, Attacking His Reflection in the Window 29

River and Fugue 31

Camera Obscura 33

Narrative 34

III And I You

Week Ten: Plum 37

The World Tips Back 40

Week Twenty: Indulgences 42

The Death of My Mother's Father 44

Yahrzeit 45

Kaddish 46

Hashem 47

IV The More Extravagant Feast

Almanac 51

Week Thirty-Four: Atomic 52

Helping 54

Furniture 55

Waking Up the Bell 56

Carrot 57

Table 58

Engagement 59

Notes 65

Acknowledgments 67

Editorial Reviews

*Silver Winner of the 2020 Nautilus Book Award for Poetry*

“[The More Extravagant Feast] keeps faithful company with the world and earns its name. The darkness and suffering of living on earth are assumed . . . and yet, it is ultimately informed by the deep logic of compassion (is there a deeper human logic?).”—Li-Young Lee, judge's statement for the Walt Whitman Award

“In her tender, delicate, humane lyrics, Green registers the pulse of our species: the rituals of marriage, parenthood. The lyric herein is the air moving through our mortal lungs. . . . This is a book that consoles, nurtures the spirit.”—Ilya Kaminsky

“What a feast! What a wonder! The whole measure of life is in these pages. I gobbled this book up and then started it again, so I could savor it further.”—Camille T. Dungy

“Leah Naomi Green’s beautiful book, her patient and generous book, The More Extravagant Feast, studies, beholds the ways everything, everything, turns around something else—the mother around the fetus, the child around the mother, the beloving around the beloved, the fruit around the seed, the hunter around the buck. And in this beholding these poems remind how the turning around so often becomes, or allows, the turning into. Another word for this witnessing? Gratitude.”—Ross Gay

“[A] stunning and sumptuous debut collection. . . . [The More Extravagant Feast] is a deep and reverent meditation on the fact that we are never solely our own, that our lives are always cohabitating with the lives of others—both human and more than human. Told in a language that celebrates compassion, empathy, and a path of loving kindness, the poems here offer our precarious and dire present moment possible paths forward via an ancient way of seeing that can still inform 21st-century living.”—Rain Taxi

“In [Green’s] poems, no barrier intrudes between humans and animals, plants, or mammals.”—Tricycle Magazine

“There is a very Zen sensibility to Green’s work, something that is reflected in both her subject matter and her style . . . [the poems’s] leanness belies an astonishing depth and understanding.”—The Colorado Review

“The action in these poems—washing plates, lighting fires in the woodstove, cutting meat—is written with affection and sensuality that transforms what could be quotidian into something hallowed.”—The Bitter Southerner

"Leah Naomi Green generously invites us into relationship: relationship with the greater-than-human-world, with one another, and with the written word. And it is in these relationships that Green challenges us to feel more deeply."—Puerto del Sol

From the Publisher