Winner of the 2008 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize selected by Mark Doty
$14.00 Paper, 978-0-9818591-1-8
2009 • 80 pp. 5 1/2 x 7 1/2"
To the Bone is a poetic feast. These lush, highly detailed,
and at times vulgar poems give insight into the body, mind, and soul of the millions of kitchen workers across the globe. Told with gritty authenticity that only someone with true life experience working “the back of the house”, to use culinary lingo, can bring, Agudelo leads us by the mouth and nose on a one of a kind experience. In Whitmanesque style, Agudelo gives voice to the myriad of colorful characters who prepare our foods and clean up after us, lifting the veil on what we’d rather not see, but can’t turn away from. To the Bone is a unique collection by a stunning new talent.
•Reviews•
•Excerpt•
•About the Author•
Reviews:
"If you want to study the nature of power and appetite, the economics of eating and serving, where better to look than the restaurant kitchen? Sebastian Agudelo locates his lyric inquiry into the intersections between food and class in the steamy back rooms where the immigrant poor wash the dishes while meals rife with information about culture and history are carried to the tables of those who can pay the bill. Inventive, politically alert, both disenchanted and compassionate, Agudelo invites Whitman and Auden behind the scenes, into the aspiration, struggle and resignation behind the swinging doors. To the Bone is an unexpected, bracing debut."
—Mark Doty
"Sebastian Agudelo, by concentrating on cooking, has found a way to synthesize the various strata of an entire society, and, as well, to accommodate a poetic language of remarkable range and density. To the Bone is, at its heart, a meditation on the human cost of the finest things. Richly allusive, consumately literate, as passionate as it is intelligent, it reads like an aria."
—Rodney Jones
His work is expertly crafted and will connect with readers, making To the Bone unique and enjoyable.
—Midwest Book Review
Both poet and chef, Agudelo scrubs and knifes language with utmost skill.... Perhaps nowhere since Proust do lines stoke or stroke the senses with such clarity and sensuality as they do here...
—Gary Cohen, Lana Turner
Artichoke
Somewhere, the downy bristles of its heart
stand for our hungers, for our wants.
Somewhere its shingled leaves explain
God or nature’s intractable math.
Chef’s tasting offers adobo-crusted tuna
on a barigoule of turned artichokes.
To turn, you swivel the vegetable,
paring blade perpendicular to the base,
till grayish exterior gives way to green.
That’s as far as any book has taken me,
abridged directives, know-how aside.
The rest is up to nerve and muscle,
when it’s too late. Not just late to learn,
midnight almost. With nine cases to go,
better take Chef’s advice and not dwell
on each heart more than ten seconds.
“They better be round,” he means round,
means literal one Mississippi, two Mississippi
kind of second and the heart is bract
and pulpy calyx, bobbing in acidulated water.
Poets of the 1890’s got high on opium
drunk on absinthe, just to read the shimmer
spume, and fluorescence of a worn-out world.
Poets now will diet on bizarre produce.
Furrowed between bad childhoods
and worsedivorces, curly tuber and thistle,
pomegranate and alligator pear are harvested
and piled high in altars to a faith—
untenable and dubious, like all faiths—
that any subject, scraped from so much
of the anthropocentric dung that manured
its growth, will lock the senses to
a primal world, Edenic, Paradisal.
Butcher will pity the sow’s frown,
carpenter know tree from a planned stud.
And cook? Well, Rosa, helping me tonight,
lit two votive candles in the morning.
Her kid hasn’t eaten since her husband left,
and she’s wondering if something she did,
moonlighting here and there, overtime,
alienated Javier, though she doesn’t say
alienate. She’s ambling the corridors
of perplexity and as she goes, she christens
the new turns in a place too ready to aerate.
Like Eve in the garden, food’s her least concern,
though she knows food, with that carnal intimate
knowledge that lets her talk and scramble
through each case, an artichoke every three
seconds, perfectly round, three literal seconds.
Sebastian Agudelo was born in Mexico City. He earned his MA from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and currently teaches literature and writing at University of the Arts and Temple University. He has worked extensively in restaurants in Philadelphia, where he presently lives with his wife and daughter.
