All the Wild Hungers by Karen Babine
As someone who also uses making food – “a mode of self-sufficiency”, a way of wrapping my head and hands around care I can give to others – to cope, I was drawn to how you shaped your hands around the mass of confusion and chaos in this book, All the Wild Hungers, which became yours as your mother resigned herself to chemotherapy, and what questions you let rise. “What is inside us that never goes away”? You ask us as you ask yourself. Possible answers eke themselves out as you buy a Le Creuset pan for $7.99 at the thrift shop and learn, from Google, to season her, as you watch your nephew “dump… an entire bottle of green sprinkles on a single cookie,” as your mother has the “rare strength… to sit at the table” for the first time in days after her treatment… All the Wild Hungers unfolds expansively in small gestures. “There is chemistry here, even if I don’t understand it completely”. It is created like the “courses” of a meal, taken separately but appreciated together, leaving any reader feeling full.