By Leah Naomi Green. Graywolf Press, 2020.
Winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets (selected by Li-Young Lee), The More Extravagant Feast focuses on the trophic exchanges of a human body with the world via pregnancy, motherhood, and interconnection—the acts of making and sustaining other bodies from one’s own, and one’s own from the larger world. Leah Naomi Green writes from attentiveness to the vast availability and capacity of the weedy, fecund earth and from her own human place within more-than-human life, death, and birth. Lyrically and spiritually rich, striving toward honesty and understanding, The More Extravagant Feast is an extraordinary book of awareness of our dependency on ecological systems—seen and unseen.
When I come back in, she asks me to draw a picture
of her father on the hill. I pick her up—the miracle
of her lungs that grew inside me,
kept long dark—her working heart
let out into the rounder world,
the more extravagant feast.
—from “The More Extravagant Feast”
Praise for the book:
“This book keeps faithful company with the world and earns its name. The darkness and suffering of living on earth are assumed in this work, woven throughout the fabric of its lineated perceptions and insights, and yet, it is ultimately informed by the deep logic of compassion (is there a deeper human logic?) and enacts the wisdom of desire and fecundity reconciled with knowledge of death and boundedness. These poems remind us that when language is used to mediate between a soul’s inner contents and the outer world’s over-abundance of being and competing meanings, it’s possible to both transcend the nihilism of word games, thereby discovering a more meaningful destiny for language, as well as reveal the body of splendor which is Existence.”—Li-Young Lee
“Leah Naomi Green’s beautiful book, her patient and generous book, The More Extravagant Feast, studies, beholds the ways everything, everything, turns around something else—the mother around the fetus, the child around the mother, the beloving around the beloved, the fruit around the seed, the hunter around the buck. And in this beholding these poems remind how the turning around so often becomes, or allows, the turning into. Another word for this witnessing? Gratitude.”—Ross Gay
“‘Time doesn’t move, we move,’ says Tolstoy. And so we travel—inside our bodies, inside our days, our families. Leah Naomi Green’s calm, clear eye documents the essential, elemental music of this journey. In her tender, delicate, humane lyrics, Green registers the pulse of our species: the rituals of marriage, parenthood. The lyric herein is the air moving through our mortal lungs.
In a time of constant public scandals, in a moment of outrageous political acts, betrayals, disappointments, what luck to open a kind, gentle book that sees us clearly, without patronizing. It is a book that consoles, nurtures the spirit.”—Ilya Kaminsky
“What a feast! What a wonder! The whole measure of life is in these pages. I gobbled this book up and then started it again, so I could savor it further.”—Camille T. Dungy
