9/1/2023 0 Comments Bromine conjure shopSomehow he seems uniquely up to the task. In fact, he’s made a career of turning huge amounts of arcane food science, centuries of history and culture, and wonderfully oddball,just-for-the-heck-of-it facts into a good read for curious cooks and eaters. He likes nothing better than surfing journals the likes of Cereal Chemistry, Poultry Science, and The Bulletin of the Japanese Society of Scientific Fisheries. Tall, bearded, and unapologetically bookish, he’s America’s premier food wonk. McGee is the author of On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen ,a doorstop of a book that first appeared in 1984 and became an instant classic. McGee, who is wearing a regulation-issue hairnet, bows over it and draws a deep, appreciative breath. The sea bream shimmers with freshness in its box of shaved ice. Sakata mentions in passing that both fish are bought by the French Laundry, Thomas Keller’s four-star temple to cuisine in Napa Valley. Favored for sashimi, it’s quite lovely, with silver skin, luminous yellow stripes, a tail that blushes deep pink. “It makes wonderful broth.”Ī golden threadfin bream, itoyori in Japanese, also catches McGee’s eye. “In Japan we call it aka-yagara, which means ‘red arrow,’” says Glenn Sakata, IMP’s general manager. “Look at that, with that schnoz, and a whip coming out of its tail,” he says, stooping over what turns out to be acornet fish, a long, bony creature with a fluted tube for a snout, a strange rear end, and an altogether alarming red color. workers are inspecting shipments of gleaming ice-packed fish at IMP Foods, a company in San Mateo, California, that supplies sushi-grade specimens to Japanese restaurants and a coterie of some of the most famous-and famously picky-American chefs. He lives and teaches in Cincinnati.At 6 a.m. His poems and essays have appeared widely. Even so, it manages to conjure what Wallace Stevens might have called a “planet on the table.” It feels more encyclopedic than many books twice its length, and its dedicated elaboration of a simple conceit is meditative in the truest sense.Īustin Allen’s first poetry collection, Pleasures of the Game (Waywiser Press), won the 2016 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. Alphabet eventually ends at “N” (for “nuclear”?), raising the possibility that its splendors have been cut off prematurely. The poet seems to throw up her hands, but her book is still at its midpoint she has plenty more to catalogue and cherish in the face of this menace. A few pages later we’re reminded that “hydrogen bombs exist” shortly after that, we’re reminded (or informed, if we’re not up on these technologies) that “cobalt bombs exist”. But the atmosphere of threat never dissipates. That’s not to say it becomes morose (or schmaltzy) in fact, the outstanding quality of Alphabet is its serenity, its capacity to absorb the fact of nuclear weapons into a vast natural panorama. It’s a ghost.Īlthough the following section begins with the redemptive “love exists, love exists,” the tenor of the book is never quite the same afterward. Given this setup, we might expect the word “Japan” to appear somewhere in the subsequent lines about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With Judenburg, Johannesburg, Jerusalem’s Jerusalem With water and land masses jolted by tremors Coming as it does in the “J” section, the passage also interrupts what had been a thick cluster of geographical “J” names: In section 10, the rapturous celebration of things that exist-from “June nights” to “the wingbeat variations of hedge sparrows”-takes a crucial turn with the acknowledgment that “atom bombs exist.” For a non-Danish speaker, it’s hard to know how much of the wordplay in English carries over from the original, but I read this passage as a way of starting over at “A.” In a sense, the spectacular destructiveness of the atom bomb created a new reality. Its alphabetic catalogue unfolds as a Genesis-like act of creation and naming:īracken exists and blackberries, blackberries Published in Denmark in 1981 and beautifully translated by Susanna Nied, Alphabet emerged from a late Cold War world that no longer seems as distant as it did a few years ago. Instead it deepened and took on eerie new overtones as the book progressed. Still, for all the originality of the conceit, I expected it to wear on me after a few pages. Its inventive structure, based on the Fibonacci sequence (the number of lines in each section follow the pattern 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, etc.), impressed me as both clever and challenging, and I soon gathered that Christensen was writing a collection of modern litanies, a poetic inventory of the world’s wonders and terrors. Editorial Assistant Austin Allen: Inger Christensen’s Alphabet (New Directions, 2001) is a book that made me hesitate at first, then won me over.
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