Seasoned with a dash of [Su's] meticulously crafted poetry and even a recipe, this collection celebrates words, culture, food, and the human act of making that binds them all together. A literary gourmand's delight.
--Kirkus Reviews

Su's soulful reflections call attention to the complex connections between place, cuisine, literature, and taste, and revealing interviews with Su . . . open a window onto her creative process . . . This provides much to savor.
--Publishers Weekly

In this enchanting collection of essays and interviews, poet Adrienne Su reflects on her journey as a creative writer and avid home cook, beginning at a neighbor's dinner table in 1980s Atlanta--lingering over poems, poets, and connections between food and literature--and ending in her 2023 kitchen in central Pennsylvania.

In Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet, Adrienne Su contemplates her own use of food as a recurring metaphor, influential teachers and peers, the push and pull between cooking and writing, changing expectations around English usage, and craft questions such as: Why does some subject matter refuse to cooperate in the creative process, even when it appears close to home? How does one write a good poem about being happy? Why write in rhyme when it's time-consuming and mostly out of style? What is a poem's responsibility to the literal truth?

Su's essays are driven by the tensions between worlds that overlap and collide: social conventions of the northern and southern United States; notions of what's American and what's Asian American; the demands of the page and the demands of the home; the solitariness of writing and the meaningful connection a poem can create between writer and reader. In interviews, often with fellow poets, she discusses a range of topics, from her early days in the Nuyorican poetry-slam scene to the solace of poetry and cooking during Covid-19 lockdown.

While Su's previous books are all collections of poetry, she has been publishing individual essays for many years. Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet gathers the best of them into one volume for the first time.

Peach State has its origins in Atlanta, Georgia, the author's hometown and an emblematic city of the New South, a name that reflects the American region's invigoration in recent decades by immigration and a spirit of reinvention. Focused mainly on food and cooking, these poems explore the city's transformation from the mid-twentieth century to today, as seen and shaped by Chinese Americans. The poems are set in restaurants, home kitchens, grocery stores, and the houses of friends and neighbors. Often employing forms--sonnet, villanelle, sestina, palindrome, ghazal, rhymed stanzas--they also mirror the constant negotiation with tradition that marks both immigrant and Southern experience. Excerpt from You're from the South? As if it had never joined the Union. As if we had to go through Customs when bringing Vidalia onions to uncles and cousins in the North, where Confucians and their brethren flock for education. As if our speech required translation or at least interpretation. As if Hartsfield-Jackson were a plantation, the Amtrak Crescent a moon over rows of cotton, and all of us a population that never saw snow or migration.

Middle Kingdom, Adrienne Su's first collection of poems, explores American identity in terms of language, geography, and personal history. Starting in Georgia, the poems travel to New York, New England, China, Mexico, and other locales in the search for a sense of place.

Su negotiates the mercurial new world of cultural commingling in witty, formally assured poems--often in elegantly accomplished forms which themselves add to the layering of cultural reference.--Mark Doty

Written in the shadow of the devastating events of 9/11, these beautifully crafted narrative poems reveal heartfelt insights into the emotional life of a contemporary woman in her late thirties--balancing marriage, motherhood, and career--as well as contemplating her experience as the daughter of Chinese immigrants, for whom ambition is a lower priority than survival. While many of these poems are about being a mother (With Children), Sanctuary is also about being the child of a mother (Escape from the Old Country). In measured lines that are often humorous (Asian Driver: The Sestina), Su explores the risks that an individual can and can't take as a member of any community: a neighborhood, a family, a racial group, a gender, a parent.

Adrienne Su was born in 1967 and raised in Atlanta. She received her AB from Harvard and an MFA from the University of Virginia. Her essays have been published in Saveur, Prairie Schooner, and Beard House. Her awards include a Pushcart Prize, as well as residencies at Yaddo and The MacDowell Colony. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, and Poetry 30: Thirtysomething American Thirtysomething Poets. Su teaches at Dickinson College. She is also the author of Middle Kingdom (Alice James Books, 1997).

Living Quarters uses both the structure of a domestic space and the rhythms of the seasons to seek, but not reliably find, order and consolation in life's seeming disorder. Relationships dissolve; deaths come too soon; the past vanishes; the earth that gives beautiful and nourishing foods swallows up the creatures for whom it provides. These poems struggle with that mix of affirmation and destruction, celebrating nature's generosity while trying to make peace with its cruelty.

Thought-provoking poems reflect an intimate internal dialogue, addressing, among other ideas, Is it really safer at home, or are there perils within our closest relationships, in daily domestic ritual? And where is home, when people are constantly moving, marriages dissolving, new relationships beginning and ending? When is a house just a house, and when does it become a home? Cooking warms a house and gives it a feeling of home, but does there also need to be a surrounding, anchoring community?

In this third collection, award-winning poet Adrienne Su reflects deeply about the circumstances in which people are forced to remake themselves: as parents, as immigrants, as people whose marriages have ended, as people who've wound up in a place they never intended to settle.

From Breakup

Another ending finds its place
among novels, lives, summers
that fled, but this kind has a way
of getting filed under failure:

yes, the relationship failed,
if to fail is to fail to endure.