This Noisy Egg by Nicole Walker
(Barrow Street Press, March 2010)
Amy Whipple

No matter how many classes I take, no matter how many literary journals I read, poetry still makes me nervous. The distinction between brilliant and appalling sometimes seems to be made based on how much sleep you got the night before, and it’s just so scary to look at that line and realize that everyone else around you picked the opposite side.

It needn’t be that difficult, right?

All I ask of poetry is that it sends me off with strings of words that run themselves through my thoughts with the tenacity of a Top 40 hit.  I want to hear and see with the weird intensity that comes after leaving a movie theater.  I want to snuggle into images as I do my favorite memories.  This might be a childish way to read poetry, but so be it.  Because under those guidelines, Nicole Walker’s debut collection, This Noisy Egg, does all the right things.

Walker’s thirty-nine poems (nineteen of which have been previously published) meditate on conception of all kinds – birth, rebirth, beliefs. So much in these poems feels lost or unfulfilled for the many speakers though there are lighter moments as well.  “A Number of Things Are Scarily Lacking” – a list not unlike a Whitman poem or a Cole Porter song – counts on both the humorous (“9. A hotdog. No condiments.” “18. Telling your boyfriend that he looks like Alan Alda.”) as well as the crushing (“6. Your loud voice, no whispers, only walls acoustic.” “30. Turning. 30. No able-bodied Superman to spin the world backward—make up for lost time.”).

The physicality of being often emerges through the emotionality. “She doubled in size & split into you, your mother’s personal geometry. / One noisy seed caused a sea of regret & repainted walls,” says the narrator of “Bivalves.” And in “The Coroner Senses a Blackbird” – “My body told a story my mouth could / not hide.”

As might be expected, the collection wavers a bit in the middle. “What Is Wanted from the Suicides” is probably the weakest piece, not really adding anything to the thick stack of suicide poetry already in existence. I wouldn’t not recommend the book as a result of it, though. Especially by the time we get to my favorite lines in the collection, which are in the middle of “Where P is P & not P”: “You will / find the compass / which will / tell you what lines you must read.”  (Note: sometimes you stumble across exactly what you need to hear.)

While most of the poems fall into a standard page-or-so length, the penultimate poem, “The Unlikely Origin of the Species,” stretches for almost twelve full pages.  It is here where the changing rules of childhood parallel the just as random rules for which animals become pets while others are left to the wild.  It’s actually the narrator of “Canister and Turkey Vulture” that explains the themes most aptly: “everything that stands between the oh so obvious / and the almost can’t imagine.” (Almost can’t imagine – Darwin and St. Francis of Assisi in a tryst.)

The broken sections of the poem are marked with Greek symbols and headline-esque words. To that end, Walker’s note to the poem adds much to “Unlikely” as well as the collection as a whole: “But doesn’t it nearly make you cry when you realize the alphabet doesn’t have to begin with the letter A?”

Amy Whipple is an MFA candidate in nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh. Readers can also find her at <http://www.amywhipple.com/>.

Medium Raw:  A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook by Anthony Bourdain
(Ecco, June 2010)
Erin Lewenauer

It’s been a busy ten years since Anthony Bourdain first let readers into the dark corners of his kitchen and his mind with the mega-bestseller Kitchen Confidential:  Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly.  The sometimes ornery chef has gone on to publish a hefty handful of books and articles while moving from country to country with his Emmy Award-winning show No Reservations.

Now retired from the restaurant kitchen, Bourdain proves that he has indeed learned a lot in his 28 years behind the stove. Like him or hate him, Bourdain does not pull punches.  He speaks with clarity about chefdom in his Confidential sequel, Medium Raw, revealing “the searing heat, the mad pace, the never-ending stress and melodrama, the low pay, probable lack of benefits, inequity and futility, the cuts and burns and damage to body and brain—the lack of anything resembling normal hours or a normal personal life.”

The book opens with a scene a la film noir in which a group of heavy-hitter chefs gather in secret to partake in illegal cuisine.  The chapters that follow touch on Bourdain’s reckless days on St. Barts, the conundrum of selling out, and the chef-author’s updated feelings on fellow gastronomic celebrities. “Rachael Ray sent me a fruit basket.  So I stopped saying mean things about her.  It’s that easy with me now,” a sanguine Bourdain admits.

Once a rogue and a provocateur, the Bourdain of Medium Raw is a sage authority.  “I am frequently asked by aspiring chefs, dreamers young and old, attracted by the lure of slowly melting shallots and caramelizing pork belly, or delusions of Food Network stardom, if they should go to culinary school,” says Bourdain.  “I usually give a long, thoughtful, and qualified answer.  But the short answer is ‘no’.”

After his own graduation from the Culinary Institute of America in his early 20s, Bourdain published two “unsuccessful novels” and kept his day job, which spanned an impressive number of Manhattan kitchens.  But the facts of Bourdain’s life are different now; he is older, he is a father, he is no longer a chef, and he deems himself happily uncool.  He has traded the fast-paced, sweaty, profanity-ridden days in the kitchen for the time and the pleasure to dream up new ways to vilify Ronald McDonald for his daughter’s benefit.  The bombastic and angry tone has mellowed considerably.

Medium Raw’s camera pans out slowly on the present, the scene spliced together with vivid shots of bygone years.  Bourdain manages to avoid sentimentality in favor of a studious take on today’s food culture, where the Food Network thrives yet Gourmet magazine is out of business.  Bourdain intelligently and humorously explores the effects of the economic crisis on the restaurant business, the ups and downs of Top Chef, a day in the life at New York’s Le Bernardin, the benefits of dozen-course tasting menus versus lure hamburgers, and his latest heroes and villains.

All of the skills that served Bourdain well as a chef—“creativity, technical skill, leadership abilities, flexibility, grace under pressure, sense of humor, and sheer strength and endurance”—have translated into his writing.  In one of the best and most candid moments of the book, he allows readers to peer in on his coveted “food porn,” describing himself devouring a pain raisin at a small, Parisian boulangerie:  “The reaction is violent.  It hurts.  Butter floods your head and you think for a second you’re going to black out.”

The tamed, more circumspect Bourdain of Medium Raw remains detail-oriented, hilarious, and sharp as ever despite the constant references to his age.  As impressive as his hyper-awareness of foodies and the food industry is his generosity in sharing an honest view of a world that blends food and travel with an intimacy that so few people ever experience first-hand.

Erin Lewenauer, a poet and freelance writer from Milwaukee, is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh. She is a graduate of Vassar College and has lived in Paris, Boulder, and New York City.