Feeding Time by Emily Scudder

Pecan Grove Press. 2011

"The poems in Feeding Time are unflinching, whether exploring domestic love, boredom, the death of a parent, the beautiful quotidian, or the inner workings of creatures and growing children. It is the 20/20 vision, never wavering, that I admire most—but it is a vision always tender and intimate, and therefore capable of summoning great sorrow and joy in a reader.

Some poems are half-cousins of Mary Oliver’s, with one major difference: the narrator here is immanent, in residence with whatever creature captivates in the natural world. In this sense, Scudder’s poems are like ‘inhabitations’— if I climbed under your shell, she writes, never an observer.

The craft shows here, and, as always, original content and delivery that often stuns and always invites us in."—Suzanne Berger, These Rooms (Penmaen Press), Legacy (Alice James Press), Horizontal Woman (Houghton Mifflin).

"In this finely-honed book of poems, Emily Scudder contemplates what feeds the appetites of the body, what nourishes the imagination. Moving deftly between domestic spaces and marine-scapes, the poet catalogues the gritty details of family life right alongside images of unexpected beauty: the underbelly of a horseshow crab, a sleeping lover's blue-jeaned leg, an old Japanese woman in a 'striped farmer's jacket.' Emily Scudder is a wise, wry, fearless observer of life in all its raw and gorgeous forms." —Susan Carlisle, Tufts University