Food

  My mother ate with her hands. She devoured Shorshe ilish: fish doused in mustard oil and turmeric, the mustard sharp in the nose, the taste bitter and salty, spicy…

Marisa Siegel currently lives, writes, and edits near NYC but thinks twenty times a day about heading back west. Poems have appeared in print journals including Handsome and Zaum, and online at Foam:e, There,…

Paul Tran is Poetry Editor at The Offing and Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow in the Writing Program at Washington University in St. Louis. Their work appears in The New Yorker, Prairie Schooner, RHINO,…

My introduction to Indian street food began in my childhood, and was presented by my mother, who was, in my most unbiased opinion, the world’s best chef. I can still…

Kaveh Akbar’s poems appear recently in The New Yorker, Poetry, APR, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. His debut full-length, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, will be published by Alice James Books in September. He is also the author of the…

A whole stick of butter melts down in a skillet. I sprinkle it with half a cup raw sugar. I am making a second try at a Tarte Tatin. It…

Meg Day is the 2015-2016 recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, a 2013 recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, and the author of Last Psalm at Sea Level (Barrow Street 2014).…

Jenn Givhan is a Mexican-American poet from the Southwestern desert. She is the author of Landscape with Headless Mama (2015 Pleiades Editors’ Prize) and Protection Spell (2016 Miller Williams Series, University of Arkansas Press). Her…

When I was growing up, my family celebrated Fat Tuesday by attending an all-you-can-eat pancake dinner in the basement of a nearby Episcopal church. “They’re practically Catholic,” my father would…

Denice Frohman is an award-winning poet, writer, performer, and educator. She is a 2014 CantoMundo Fellow, 2013 Women of the World Poetry Slam Champion, 2013 Hispanic Choice Award winner, and…

Summers in Progreso are hot, blistering months. Pregnant with desperation, they swell during the beginning weeks, then ooze and burst at the season’s end. It was raining when we returned…

Clint Smith is a writer and doctoral candidate at Harvard University and has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, and the National Science Foundation. He is a 2014…

Christopher Kempf is the author of Late in the Empire of Men, which won the 2015 Levis Prize from Four Way Books. Recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, as well as…

I arrived in Rome at the end of a hot June, to study Italian for a month the summer between my junior and senior years of college. I hadn’t brought…