I was utterly titillated by the feelings of recognition this chapbook gifted me with. Anna Nobile’s poetry about growing up in Toronto in a Northern Italian home is a cookie-cutter version of my own upbringing. It’s not exact, but it is so similar that I could identify my own family recipe for spaghetti sauce which includes lots of tomato with some sugar added and cloves. The mix of recipes and poems offer great insights into cultural difference. They are sustained and strengthened by the refined expository language that weaves through the first half of the book. The second half seems to break into shorter versed poems about companionship, surpassing reductive notions of difference, and feelings of immigrant strife, bitterness, and impotence: “(…)she says little when she goes/ leaves behind the fuzzy shirt,/the stain that won’t come out.” (from the poem “Stains”). You Are What You Eat makes a great addition to any kitchen. The recipes are as enlightening as the poetry that buttresses them. (PVP)
chapbook, 16 pages, $5 + $1 shipping, Anna Nobile, 865 Union Street, Vancouver, BC, V6A 2C5