Appetite: Food as Metaphor: An Anthology of Women Poets

Editors: Phyllis Stowell and Jeanne Foster

Publisher: BOA Editions (2002)

In poems from as varied women poets as Jane Kenyon, Lucille Clifton, and Anne Sexton, food emerges as a re-occurring and central metaphor in the way women live, in the pulse of the everyday, and as a vehicle for the exotic. From coffee to caviar, from potatoes to dandelions—even in hunger and anorexia—the metaphors of food have worked like yeast in the imagination of these poets.

Phyllis Stowell initiated the Saint Mary’s College of California MFA program. She is a former Fellow of the Camargo Foundation and was a Dewitt Wallace/Reader’s Digest Fellow at the MacDowell Colony. She was granted a Barbara Deming Money for Women Award and was a winner of the International Quarterly Crossing Boundaries Poetry Prize. Her publications include Assent to Solitude, Who Is Alice?, and Sequence and Consequence, an Alchemical Journal. She publishes poetry, criticism, and poetry reviews.