The Daily Glance
Sheila Murphy's Letters to Unfinished J. is comprised of prose poems that act like letters address to some person. We don't get names in the book, so we're left trying to feel who the person is receiving the pieces. Some of the poems jump from topic to topic with little central cohesion, while others center around an idea and pull in disparate elements. "4" is one of those that centers around something, in this case cooking:
Teach me to be a Polish cook who's fluent in the
spices and can fashion taste in nourishment. My
home perspires boredom with the instant things
I pass of as planned meals spawned by skin-of-
teeth arrivals up a driveway separate from
plaisir. Teach me to factfind buttery mementos
of long afternoons pronouncing French between
delectable taste copings that rescind all disci-
plined approaches to consumption. . . .
This poem uses cooking as a place to jump off into a wider range of ideas, such as the process of creation and consumption by an audience of a text. Brief discussions of how texts mean occur throughout the book, and Sheila's playfullness with language makes us look for new connections between ideas and images.
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