Samantha Bernstein, Kitchen Island Poems
Trust, you’ll be equally comforted and discomforted by this collection from Toronto-based poet, English and Creative Writing professor, activist, and mama/baking queen—for real, she’s all the things!—Samantha Bernstein. In Kitchen Island Poems, Bernstein takes up some of the most prescient questions of our pandemic lives: is it real work to clean this table, mess it up, clean it again? should I have spent this time gaining more marketable skills? what kinds of poetry do children write every day? what kind of breading will we use when we eat the rich? and then, how rich, how delightfully rich, have we become in other ways? Equal parts come on in and please, leave me this space, this chapbook is twenty-eight gorgeous pages that will leave you just a little bit uneasy, but in the best, most productive, most political ways.
Printed in a limited run of fifty copies at Product Photo in Toronto, this chapbook is handbound by two editors and the author. Cover designed and chapbook typeset by Dani Spinosa, featuring this gorgeous photo of the poet’s for realsies kitchen island, taken by Jesse Pajuaar.
Sample Poem:
Impulse Control
I will not post on social
this hairball in its slime,
though kneeling over it, competent
with peroxide and paper towel had a moment of wondering why
—the baby’s crying; will she quiet?—
some facets of the domestic
are so exalted over others. Are sourdough
loaves so much more gorgeous than
hills of unfolded clothes?
It’s the craft, I suppose. Laundry
cultivates itself.
Though if you ever
had the pleasure
of paper towel folded just so
to absorb a mess,
you know any moment you take
functional measure of a thing
has its artistry.
I had been headed for a poem.
Who knows what, now?
On my knees there was
the red geranium in bloom
against the dark window
above my head. (It was Barthes
who hated geraniums? Yes. Also
women in slacks.
Related?) One wipes and thinks
and ministers to things,
and then it’s late.
Be dark enough thy shades, and be thou
there content.
This frittering is freedom
If you have something to say,
say it, else go
fold the laundry and watch a show, clean the hairball,
gather that wad of undigested self,
and throw it in the bin.