Like Prufrock's coffee spoons, an existence can be measured by its detritus, or so attests Iowa Writers' Workshop graduate Karen Leona Anderson, whose Receipt: Poems mines recipes and receipts for their larger context. Under Anderson's pen, these scraps metamorphose into records of a life lived, from doubts to squabbles to celebrations, measuring cups of sugar and teaspoons of vanilla much like the passage of time.
Receipt's range allows readers to feel as if they're shadowing Anderson's every footstep, from the drugstore to the kitchen, the dressing room to the online shopping cart. In "SKIRT ($26.96 T.J. Maxx)," a constricting piece of cloth becomes a metaphor for the pressures of womanhood. She writes, "I can't/ pin up a whole half/ of the species. I can't stop./ I guess a good skirt/ would help... I guess the force with which/ I pleat myself back to myself." These glimpses at the psyche pepper every poem like a condiment, the ingredient that gives them their heft. Where lesser poets might stop at the gimmick, Anderson unravels each garment until we're left with the barest, most essential questions: What does it mean to be a human (woman) in this world?
Receipt doesn't contain a definitive answer, but its vital, probing questions get the reader one step closer. It's a celebration of the banal: the scraps we often throw away, the mall stores of our youth, TV dinners and vintage Betty Crocker, the artifacts that form a life entire. --Linnie Greene, freelance writer