Keynote
Winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, selected by Li-Young Lee
Book Title
The More Extravagant Feast
Subtitle
Poems
Cover Image
- One of the Boston Globe's Best Books of 2020
Silver Winner of the 2020 Nautilus Book Award for Poetry
Body
The More Extravagant Feast focuses on the trophic exchanges of a human body with the world via pregnancy, motherhood, and interconnection—the acts of making and sustaining other bodies from one’s own, and one’s own from the larger world. Leah Naomi Green writes from attentiveness to the vast availability and capacity of the weedy, fecund earth and from her own human place within more-than-human life, death, and birth. Lyrically and spiritually rich, striving toward honesty and understanding, The More Extravagant Feast is an extraordinary book of awareness of our dependency on ecological systems—seen and unseen.
When I come back in, she asks me to draw a picture
of her father on the hill. I pick her up—the miracle
of her lungs that grew inside me,
kept long dark—her working heart
let out into the rounder world,
the more extravagant feast.
—from “The More Extravagant Feast”
When I come back in, she asks me to draw a picture
of her father on the hill. I pick her up—the miracle
of her lungs that grew inside me,
kept long dark—her working heart
let out into the rounder world,
the more extravagant feast.
—from “The More Extravagant Feast”
List Price
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About the Author
Credit: Ben Eland
Praise
- “[The More Extravagant Feast] keeps faithful company with the world and earns its name. The darkness and suffering of living on earth are assumed . . . and yet, it is ultimately informed by the deep logic of compassion (is there a deeper human logic?).”—Li-Young Lee
- “In her tender, delicate, humane lyrics, Green registers the pulse of our species: the rituals of marriage, parenthood. The lyric herein is the air moving through our mortal lungs. . . . This is a book that consoles, nurtures the spirit.”—Ilya Kaminsky
- “Leah Naomi Green’s beautiful book, her patient and generous book, The More Extravagant Feast, studies, beholds the ways everything, everything, turns around something else—the mother around the fetus, the child around the mother, the beloving around the beloved, the fruit around the seed, the hunter around the buck. And in this beholding these poems remind how the turning around so often becomes, or allows, the turning into. Another word for this witnessing? Gratitude.”—Ross Gay
- “What a feast! What a wonder! The whole measure of life is in these pages. I gobbled this book up and then started it again, so I could savor it further.”—Camille T. Dungy
