{"id":128,"date":"2026-01-10T05:35:36","date_gmt":"2026-01-10T11:35:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theliteraryunderground.org\/fugett\/?p=128"},"modified":"2026-01-10T05:35:36","modified_gmt":"2026-01-10T11:35:36","slug":"richard-modiano-reviews-a-matter-of-taste-poems-of-hunger-and-thirst-by-deborah-ketai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theliteraryunderground.org\/fugett\/2026\/01\/10\/richard-modiano-reviews-a-matter-of-taste-poems-of-hunger-and-thirst-by-deborah-ketai\/","title":{"rendered":"Richard Modiano reviews A MATTER OF TASTE: POEMS OF HUNGER AND THIRST by Deborah Ketai"},"content":{"rendered":"

first published at IN CONVERSATION<\/em> by The Literary Underground<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>A Matter of Taste: Poems of Hunger and Thirst<\/em>\u00a0by Deborah Ketai
\n<\/strong>Citizens for Decent Literature Press 2026, Winner of the Brian Fugett Memorial Prize<\/p>\n

Deborah Ketai\u2019s\u00a0A Matter of Taste<\/em>\u00a0is a collection obsessed\u2014in the most productive sense\u2014with 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 \u201cThe great hunger\u201d to the domestic ache of \u201cAll she wanted,\u201d Ketai treats taste as both a sensory faculty and an ethical one: how we choose, consume, savor, or refuse the world.<\/p>\n

The poems are unified less by narrative than by pressure. Again and again, Ketai presses bodily experience \u2014 eating, swallowing, choking, burning, digesting \u2014 against intellectual and emotional states. Mental illness, especially bipolar disorder, is rendered not abstractly but somatically. In poems like \u201cBipolar, too\u201d and \u201cLithium Lament,\u201d 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 \u201cmiddle road,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

What distinguishes Ketai\u2019s work is its tonal range. She moves fluently between the cosmic and the comic, the erotic and the elegiac. A poem like \u201cDescent into the maelstrom\u201d is unabashedly sensual, while \u201cVin ordinaire\u201d delivers a sharp, almost essayistic critique of linguistic inflation and emotional exaggeration. Elsewhere, domestic scenes \u2014 gardening, cooking, family dinners \u2014 become sites of myth-making. \u201cWorld builder,\u201d one of the collection\u2019s standouts, casts maternal labor as ecological creation, collapsing the distance between making crepes and sustaining galaxies. The poem\u2019s breathless abundance mirrors its subject: care as generative force.<\/p>\n

Food imagery anchors the book, but it never becomes gimmick. Hunger is political (\u201cThe smelting pot\u201d), ecological (\u201cDrought\u201d), relational (\u201cRashomon\u201d), and spiritual (\u201cAn older woman considers prayer\u201d). Even God is undone by appetite in \u201cOn the eighth day,\u201d 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. \u201cA Thanksgiving letter to Mom\u201d captures mourning as a hollow fullness\u2014too much food, not enough presence\u2014while refusing easy consolation.<\/p>\n

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 (\u201cThat\u2019s my story, and I\u2019m sticking to it\u201d), they remain grounded in felt experience, in the body as the final arbiter of truth.<\/p>\n

A Matter of Taste<\/em>\u00a0is 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

A Matter of Taste: Poems of Hunger and Thirst<\/em>\u00a0by Deborah Ketai is available for purchase\u00a0HERE<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

While a resident of New York City,\u00a0Richard Modiano<\/strong>\u00a0became 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. \u00a0In 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … <\/p>\n

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