NOW AVAILABLE! The Winner of the Brian Fugett Memorial Prize, A MATTER OF TASTE: Poems of Hunger and Thirst by Deborah Ketai is now available for purchase at https://www.amazon.com/Matter-Taste-Poems-Hunger-Thirst/dp/B0G7H4XSHF
Edited by Michele McDannold & Aleathia Drehmer, Published by Citizens for Decent Literature Press.
The Brian Fugett Memorial Prize is awarded to work that embodies the spirit of Brian Fugett’s writing—bold, unflinching, and deeply human. Presented by Citizens for Decent Literature Press, the prize recognizes poetry that speaks with clarity, urgency, and heart.
Deborah Ketai (she/her) writes from the intersection of bipolarity, bisexuality, and creative self-doubt, leavened with humor and wordplay. Her work has appeared in Rattle, Think, and many other venues. She and her wife live in Connecticut’s Naugatuck River Valley.
One day, Deborah Ketai looked back over her work and was shocked to discover how many poems expressed hunger or thirst-for food, for love, for experience. The poems selected in A Matter of Taste: Poems of Hunger and Thirst use food and drink to muse on morality, interrogate isolation, and celebrate dust mites. (Yes, dust mites.) Whether proclaiming herself a black hole or singing a paean to her wife’s vegetable garden, Ketai extols the “infinite varietals, extraordinary notes of the daily wine.” Some of the poems deal directly with hunger; others allude to it by referencing drought, salt, or “a steady diet of adulthood.” The reader will be forgiven for taking a break to run to the refrigerator.
