Pantry

The poems in Pantry take their titles from kitchen objects. Some objects are common to most kitchens, like dishwashers and double boilers, and others are less common, like pie birds and olive pitters. The poems are not literally about these objects. Rather, the objects, or some aspect of them—a shape, a use, some minute detail—are landmarks in an interior domestic landscape. And few domestic landscapes are more interior than the pantry, a place where objects are laid aside for later use, sometimes years later or not at all. These are the things we hold onto, forget, and discover again. They are the things underlying our material lives. The poems in this book begin here, in the closely packed pantry, but then slip beneath the material objects to explore the domestic lives that spark, seethe, and sometimes explode around them.

"In Pantry, Lilah Hegnauer exalts kitchen articles and utensils, their graspable measure of handles, solidity of copper, the comparative impermanence of their bodies in relation to ours," says D.A. Powell, recipient of the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Prize in Poetry. "Like Stein and Ponge, Hegnauer uncovers the magical—and tremendously affecting—life of objects in each crenature, joint and flange.”

"Pantry is no Food Network test kitchen, no fusty closet of canned goods," says Lisa Spaar, author of Vanitas, Rough. "Erotic, witty, smart, playful, these poems make the quotidian realm of objects an occasion for wooing, meditation, and praise. Think of the Gertrude Stein of Tender Button meeting Emily Dickinson (“Vesuvius at Home”) in a throw-down match where what’s at stake is the veracity and voracity of female desire, and you’ll have a sense of the spell cast by this intoxicating wunderkammer of a book.”