first published at IN CONVERSATION by The Literary Underground

A Matter of Taste: Poems of Hunger and Thirst by Deborah Ketai
Citizens for Decent Literature Press 2026, Winner of the Brian Fugett Memorial Prize

Deborah Ketai’s A Matter of Taste is a collection obsessed—in the most productive sense—with appetite: for food, for sex, for meaning, for language, for life itself. Hunger is not merely a metaphor here; it is the governing physics of the book. From the cosmic ravenousness of “The great hunger” to the domestic ache of “All she wanted,” Ketai treats taste as both a sensory faculty and an ethical one: how we choose, consume, savor, or refuse the world.

The poems are unified less by narrative than by pressure. Again and again, Ketai presses bodily experience — eating, swallowing, choking, burning, digesting — against intellectual and emotional states. Mental illness, especially bipolar disorder, is rendered not abstractly but somatically. In poems like “Bipolar, too” and “Lithium Lament,” mania and medication are tasted, craved, resisted. The speaker mourns the loss of intensity even while acknowledging its danger, asking not for a cure but for a “middle road,” a way to live without erasing desire. These poems refuse the tidy arc of recovery narratives; instead, they honor ambivalence as a form of truth.

What distinguishes Ketai’s work is its tonal range. She moves fluently between the cosmic and the comic, the erotic and the elegiac. A poem like “Descent into the maelstrom” is unabashedly sensual, while “Vin ordinaire” delivers a sharp, almost essayistic critique of linguistic inflation and emotional exaggeration. Elsewhere, domestic scenes — gardening, cooking, family dinners — become sites of myth-making. “World builder,” one of the collection’s standouts, casts maternal labor as ecological creation, collapsing the distance between making crepes and sustaining galaxies. The poem’s breathless abundance mirrors its subject: care as generative force.

Food imagery anchors the book, but it never becomes gimmick. Hunger is political (“The smelting pot”), ecological (“Drought”), relational (“Rashomon”), and spiritual (“An older woman considers prayer”). Even God is undone by appetite in “On the eighth day,” a darkly playful poem that turns creation into self-consumption. Throughout, Ketai resists sentimentality. Grief, particularly for the mother figure who looms large in the collection, is rendered with bite rather than balm. “A Thanksgiving letter to Mom” captures mourning as a hollow fullness—too much food, not enough presence—while refusing easy consolation.

Formally, Ketai is adventurous without being showy. She uses free verse, prose poetry, enjambment, and compression to suit the emotional logic of each piece. Her language is tactile and precise; she trusts specificity over abstraction. Even when the poems veer toward the surreal or grotesque (“That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it”), they remain grounded in felt experience, in the body as the final arbiter of truth.

A Matter of Taste is not a comfortable book, nor should it be. It asks readers to examine what they hunger for, what they consume unthinkingly, and what they can no longer stomach. Yet it is also deeply alive, animated by curiosity, humor, and a fierce insistence on engagement. Ketai’s poems do not seek to resolve appetite; they honor it as the engine of thought and feeling. In doing so, they offer not satiety, but something better: a sharpened sense of what it means to be alive and wanting.

A Matter of Taste: Poems of Hunger and Thirst by Deborah Ketai is available for purchase HERE

While a resident of New York City, Richard Modiano became active in the literary community connected to the Poetry Project where he came to know Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, William S. Burroughs and Ted Berrigan.  In 2001 he was a programmer at Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center, joined the Board of Trustees in 2006, and from 2010 to 2019, he served as Executive Director. The Huffington Post named him as one of 200 people doing the most to promote poetry in the United States. Modiano is the winner of the 2022 Joe Hill Prize for labor poetry and is a Pushcart Prize nominee.

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.

This year, “A Matter of Taste: Poems of Hunger and Thirst” by Deborah Ketai was chosen as the winning manuscript. This will be Deborah’s first ever published collection at the age of 72. Thank you again to all the entrants for participating this year.

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.

Citizens for Decent Literature Press is happy to announce the shortlist for the Brian Fugett Memorial Prize. Sincere thanks to all the entrants. The winner of the contest will be announced on November 8, 2025 at the Underground Lit Fest in Toledo, Ohio.

Top 6: Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal, Westley Heine, Deborah Ketai, Len Kuntz, Zak Mucha, Lisa Nichols

Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal is the author of three poetry books, Raw Materials (Pygmy Forest Press), Peering into the Sun (Poet’s Democracy), and Make the Water Laugh (Rogue Wolf Press). He is the author of eight chapbooks from Kendra Steiner Editions, and the chapbooks, Songs for Oblivion (Alternating Current Press/Propaganda Press), The Book of Absurd Dreams (New Polish Beat), and Befor and Well After Midnight (Deadbeat Press). His poems have appeared in Blue Collar Review, Mad Swirl, Rusty Truck, Unlikely Stories, and Zygote In My Coffee. His e-book,
Everything is Permitted was published by Ten Pages Press.

In a yearbook somewhere in Wisconsin Westley Heine was voted most likely to be on the cover of People Magazine. From highschool he went straight to jail for using his fists rather than his words. Heine learned more behind bars than he did in Art School over the next four years. In college he rented himself out as a dark brooding boyfriend to young women who were turned on by existential angst over American football. When they learned the tortured poet thing wasn’t just an act he was left for dead. He is banned for life from the Los Vegas Strip for destruction of property. He moved to Los Angeles twice and both times he was chewed up and spit out. After the housing market crash in 2008 he lived as a street musician squatting on the Westside of Chicago. He is now the Poet Laureate of drinking forties on Lower Wacker Drive. He has twice featured at the original Poetry Slam at The Green Mill where the crowd would heckle him for not being uplifting so he started his own open mic at The Gallery Cabaret encouraging all styles. Once he slept in Central Park, saw God in Mexico, cursed in New Orleans, married in Austin, and honeymooned in Paris. He now lives in Chicago alone with his demons.

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.

Len Kuntz is a writer from Washington State and the author of six books, most recently, THINGS I CAN’T EVEN TELL MYSELF, out from Ravenna Press. You can find more of his writing at https://lenkuntz.blogspot.com

Zak Mucha, LCSW, is a psychoanalyst and president of the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis. He spent seven years working as the supervisor of an Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) program, providing 24/7 services to persons suffering from severe psychosis, substance abuse issues, and homelessness. Mucha has worked as a counselor and consultant for U.S. combat veterans undergoing training for digital forensic investigations in child pornography and is a board member of the Legislative Drafting Institute for Child Protection.

Before going into the clinical field, Mucha has worked as a freelance journalist, truck driver, furniture mover, construction worker, union organizer, staff member at a juvenile DCFS locked unit, and taught briefly at a women’s prison. He is the author of Emotional Abuse: A Manual for Self-Defense and Swimming to the Horizon: Crack, Psychosis, and Street-Corner Social Work as well as two collections of poetry.

(Lisa Nichols) I write at the crossroads of grit and wonder, where everyday life collides with the surreal edges of memory, history, and imagination. My work has appeared in the Le Mot Juste anthology, Owl City Press, and across local stages where I share poems as both performer and president of Rochester’s Just Poets. I feel driven to uncover the hidden undercurrents of human experience and to attempt to bring those raw, wriggling truths into the light—sometimes tender, sometimes biting, always unflinchingly honest. I am a teacher and a seeker, drawing inspiration from conversation, wilderness trails, meditation, and the chaos of raising a child in a fractured world. Whether on the page, at the mic, or on the open road atop two wheels, I try to live in presence: reading, laughing, listening, and being just one amongst the many.

Compiled after Brian Fugett’s sudden passing, this collection casts his work in a new light—read as both legacy and insight into his life and perspective. Fugett’s poems often spring from everyday observations, revealing the strange, uncomfortable, and darkly humorous sides of human behavior and social interactions. This is evident in pieces like “Saturday Morning Cartoons,” “Interviewing Mr. Weck,” “At the Nursing Home,” and “Rush Hour in Chula Vista,” where his sharp eye for peculiar details and unsettling moments shines through.

Many poems explore Fugett’s inner world—feelings of isolation, anxiety, confusion, and the search for meaning amid chaos. Themes of self-awareness, the passage of time, and grappling with personal demons recur throughout. Relationships, both fleeting and significant, appear frequently, with poems delving into attraction, awkwardness, desire, and the often-confusing nature of human connection—presented with rawness and blunt honesty.

Fugett’s satirical, sometimes scathing commentary targets modern society—consumerism, technology, religion, and social dynamics—through a lens that is both cynical and darkly humorous. At the heart of it all is his unflinching self-portrait: a voice marked by flaws, anxieties, and self-deprecating wit, giving the collection its raw, authentic power.

COVER ART BY ANDREW LANDER. Editors Aleathia Drehmer & Michele McDannold.

“The brilliance of these poems will break your heart, due to a voice silenced too soon. Yet, the humanity breathing off the page will bring a smile to the face of even the most hardened hearts. If this is to be Brian Fugett’s swan song, it’s a most beautiful melody.”—Michael N. Thompson, author of A Murder Of Crows and Verbal Alchemy

“Brian’s voice in these poems alternates between hilarity and nihilism. The hilarity is natural and infectious and the nihilism is matter of fact. The tone reminds me of a book I return to again and again whenever I am feeling my most disconnected from and most disenchanted with my fellow humans. Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung by the brilliant Lester Bangs. I only met Brian in person once, at a karaoke bar in Ohio in 2011. But I loved him and I’m grateful that he is still here in these kick life in the balls poems.”—Misti Rainwater-Lites, author of Clown Gravy and others

pre-order your copy at https://www.magicaljeep.com/product/fugett/TAPPK35FNM7O4XG53RFNB7JZ

In honor of the late editor, poet, and publisher Brian W. Fugett, The Literary Underground is proud to announce the launch of the Brian Fugett Memorial Prize, an annual award recognizing an outstanding poetry chapbook manuscript.

Best known for his irreverent voice and unwavering support for indie lit, Fugett was a driving force behind many DIY literary efforts, including Zygote in My Coffee, Tainted Coffee Press and the Nothing to Lose internet radio program. This new prize celebrates his legacy by uplifting bold, uncompromising work in the spirit of his own.

Submissions will be open from September 1 through September 30, 2025.

One manuscript will be selected for publication by Citizens for Decent Literature Press. The winning poet will receive 25 contributor copies of the chapbook.

This year’s judges are poets Aleathia Drehmer and Michele McDannold.