What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison

by Camille T. Dungy

Camille Dungy has a garden of verses that spring up with the sunshine or hide with you in the dusk. "Cleaning" best sums up What To Eat, What To Drink, What To Leave For Poison, an amazing poetry collection, when Dungy pens "understanding clearly/what is fatal to the body./I only understand too late/what can be fatal to the heart." Take an ice tea and sit on the veranda or take a glass of wine and prop up in bed but whatever way you like your poetry, this book is a must.— Nikki Giovanni.

Genres: Poetry, Book Club

88 pages, Paperback

First published February 28, 2006

About the author

Camille T. Dungy (born in Denver in 1972) is an American poet and professor.

She is author of the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and three poetry collections, including, Smith Blue (Southern Illinois University Press, 2011) and Suck on the Marrow (Red Hen Press, 2010). Dungy is editor of Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (UGA, 2009), co-editor of From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great (Persea, 2009), and assistant editor of Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade (University of Michigan Press, 2006). Her poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including The American Poetry Review, Poetry, Callaloo, The Missouri Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Poetry Daily.

Her honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Virginia Commission for the Arts, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Cave Canem, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and she is recipient of the 2011 American Book Award, a 2010 California Book Award silver medal, a two-time recipient of the Northern California Book Award, and a two-time NAACP Image Award nominee. Dungy graduated from Stanford University and the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, where she earned her MFA. Recently a professor in the Creative Department at San Francisco State University (2011-2013), she is currently a Professor in the English Department at Colorado State University.

Reviews

[Hallie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Solid 5 stars ⭐️

Sheesh. Her writing is so mellifluous.
I loved “Requiem”, told from the point of view of someone who is dying. “I looked left, not right, crossed the street and stepped in front of the bus that ended me.”

The poem, “Sinner, don’t you weep” about sexuality, desire, and pleasure. “Desire is the flesh, the fruit you cry for every night.”

The poem “Cleaning” that talks about regret, “I only understood too late what can be fatal to the heart.”

[Ebony (EKG) · Rating 5 out of 5]

From the poem, What to Eat, and What to Drink, and What to Leave for Poison:

“The song, the color, the rising ecstasy
of spring. My God. This beauty. This, this
is what I’ve hoped for.”

stunning poetry that explores womanhood, pleasure, a segregated south, and what to swallow up whole about this beautiful and tragic world.

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Debut. THIS was her debut. Holy hell. So good.

[Ellen O'brien · Rating 5 out of 5]

Seeable poetry.

[Talia Franks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Originally Published in July 2018 on Word-for-Sense and Other Stories

“Lady, my one regret / is that we don’t have appetite enough / to make you break every damned plate inside this room.” As a person of color, I am undeniably drawn to works that discuss race in a way that does not skim over the harsh realities that we face every day. As someone who appreciates a little dark humor, I also appreciate a joke thrown in the face of a racist white person and I like imagining the sour looks on their faces. “The Preachers Eat Out” is the first poem I ever read by Camille Dungy, and it exemplifies what I like most about her style. Dungy manages to tie in racial themes, and tell stories not her own while still giving us true impressions of the people within the tales. Almost none of the people that she paints pictures of within her poems have names outside of the notes at the top of the poem, and she still gives us rich impressions of the characters within them.

We learn so much about the characters within “The Preachers Eat Out” just within the 14 lines. We know that the waitress who is serving them is not doing it because she isn’t racist – she is; she just wants the tips because she has children at home, presumably is a single mother, and needed tips in order to support them. She also breaks the plates, whether of her own volition or the restaurant’s, meaning that she works at a place that can afford to break plates and is therefore slightly upscale, meaning that the preachers have money enough to pay for a nice restaurant. She does the breaking behind the building however, meaning that she doesn’t want them to know she is breaking the plates, and is making an effort to be civil. The preacher also calls her ‘lady,’ which could be seen as either a measure of respect or disrespect, depending on tone, and makes it clear that he knows about her racist actions despite her trying to hide them

Dungy’s ability to call out racist actions in a subtle and artistic manner is a skill that I greatly admire. Someone who is not as familiar with the tensions that black folks face in the United States, or not as comfortable with seeking out material explicitly written about the struggles that we face, will find a book of poems such as Dungy’s much more approachable. Through Dungy’s poems, the statistics become not just statistics, but people. Though they are unnamed, the connections that Dungy sparks allow the reader to experience much more. One can read in a history book about the segregation of buses, but when reading Dungy’s “Greyhound to Baton Rouge” there is a much stronger feeling as the listener hears “Arm around his wife, the new father stood, / relieved to see his baby still sleeping. / Small piece.” Hearing the story of this small family, the tired mother, and the bus that was completely stopped because the driver refused to go on with a white woman holding a black child, brings things into focus for someone who might not have previously have understood how things were for the non-whites in America, and the racist attitudes that we face.

These two poems are some of the ones that stuck out to me the most of Dungy’s work, as they exemplify her talent for weaving a story into a lesson, and they are the ones that I enjoyed the most and feel I got the most out of. They taught me that it is possible to be both concise and yet rich in detail and that you can give everything and nothing away about the speakers and other participants in the action of the poem.

Another poem of Dungy’s that stuck out to me was “Requiem.” The idea of someone accepting their death, and being in love with their own crooked and broken bones; the horror of those surrounding them, witness to their untimely demise – it has a sort of macabre allure. I can identify with the speaker of the poem because even though I do not desire my own death, the idea of that moment – that teetering on the edge where one looks at everything around them in that final moment and finds it beautiful – is fascinating. I think that everyone is a little bit in love with death, and when Dungy’s line reads: “Will you believe me / when I tell you I had never been so in love / with anyone as I was, then, with everyone I saw?” I can’t help but think that, yes, I can believe that. As someone who has recently experienced the loss of someone who I know was suffering, I agree with the adage that death is much better for the one dying than for the ones left behind.

When the speaker in “Requiem” starts to talk about the woman who has witnessed her death, I can’t help but think about how well Dungy has captured this intrinsic human reaction. This other woman has no connection to the speaker, yet feels all of this grief, feels the pain that is what comes with the connection that humans have when life suddenly stops. Dungy shows us how as humans we react to death, how we see it, and how, while we cannot imagine life without it, we do not expect it. In the first stanza the speaker says: “I could have lived forever / under that sky.” And yet, when the speaker’s life does end, they accept that ending with love.

It is an admirable lesson that Dungy is giving us about how death is not something that one should fear, but something that happens when the time should come, and yet again we have her artistry shining through as she does it in such a subtle way, enchanting us with words.

I learned a lot about how to write from Dungy, as she writes many poems from a third person point of view and masterfully presents the characters that appear in those poems without going into arduous detail. It was not until I read several poems by Dungy written with such provoking figures that I even realized how many of my own poems were written in the first person. Overall, the lessons that Dungy teaches throughout the book are ones that I think anyone and everyone would benefit from, and I highly encourage people to read her works.


Happy reading!

Cheers,

Talia

[Emily Shearer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such grace in handling family history, and Family History, through poetry. Dungy takes on the subjects of OJ and Ella, the Bible, and institutionalized racism as well as her grandfather's vocation as a tailor and her grandmother's wedding ring with equal heart and fervor in poems that make you go mm mm mm.

[Alison · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't like this as much as I hoped I would but I did like it! A couple of the poems were stolen directly from my emotions and I liked those best, and I also liked, after my book club explained them to me, some of the poems that are allegory or have context that I was missing on my first read. I will definitely check out more of Dungy's poetry soon.

[Winona · Rating 5 out of 5]

loved so many poems but the titular polyptych 'What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison' at the end truly broke my mind (but in the best way)

[Simon · Rating 5 out of 5]

From the back and I cannot put it better: "sweet with the richness of life and laced with bitterness of knowledge." Stories become songs, they catch you and then linger.

[Tara Betts]

This is a review that I wrote for a publication that Lenard D. Moore was editing. I thought I'd share it.

What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison
by Camille T. Dungy (Red Hen Press, 2006)
ISBN 1-59709-000-X
reviewed by Tara Betts

Dungy’s first poetry collection offers a number of ways to look at what is considered to be a part of nature, whether it is a part of the plants or the people that inhabit a place. Some of these poems undulate with sexuality, especially in lines like, “Desire is the flesh, the fruit you cry for every night” from “Sinner, Don’t You Weep.” One of the poems swelling with such bluesy desire is “Black Spoon”:

won’t give me more than the music of your fingers
strumming my slip’s strap your chest sings
to my heart’s ear while your wicked wisdom works
its secret privilege but you won’t give me more
than your body tuned for walking out my door
hush now I’m the one done let you in (40).

Dungy does not remain content with exploring the nature of desire. Instead there is an exploration of cycles—pursuit, conception, birth, life, conflicts and death. Each poem tells an ongoing story of the Dungy family accompanied by poems on incidents of the time. “We Were Two Rooms of One Timber, But I Left That Place Alone” describes one such incident by speaking in the voice of a 31-year-old widow named Sara. She recalls how her husband Henry built their 2-room home filled with life, and how all that living changed:
There is a kind of hunger that feeds on life.
They carved into him with a banquet of knives,
made stew of his skin and stirred it
with his own bones. My Henry served: The meat
and the pot to cook it in. And there was no charge
against the men who made that meal. (48)

This tension of living close to passion and death simultaneously creates urgency in these quiet poems. They are not boisterous and full of outlandish syntax or a range of poetic forms, but the range of stories about gifted tailor grandfather and a worldly teacher named Thornton and other family members are unearthed by the granddaughter who discovers the history that is absent from textbooks. “Contraband,” which is the last section, serves a reminder that black people in America were not allowed to have or do certain things. Contraband seems to resonate closely with this reminder in “Book Smart,” the only poem in which Dungy mentions the term: “To worship with intellect, /where intellect was contraband, proved faith (70).”
Such figures might be considered modest by people who would expect poems about musicians and artists, such as John Coltrane, Bessie Smith, Muhammad Ali or Kevin Young’s Jelly Roll on Jelly Roll Morton and To Repel Ghosts on Jean Michel Basquiat. Dungy even juxtaposes O.J. Simpson against Jack Johnson by comparing their urge to speed in two poems. In “How It Happened,” Simpson seeks to run with “disappearing legs and arms more secure than God’s.” Jack Johnson pays a $50 ticket twice in “Here’s $100, Cause I’ll Be Coming Back the Other Way.” He is speeding upon arrival to his destination so he pays another $50 in advance to speed back home. “There are men you can stop, some you can slow, but I’m neither (53),” Johnson insists. Instead of making well-known characters the focus of her book, there is an impression that these characters were brought up in the conversations of the family household, and like this family, O.J. Simpson and Jack Johnson attempt to circumvent the limitations imposed by race.
Most of this book consists of variations on sonnets by using 14-line poems in a varying stanza breaks and no traditional rhyme schemes. Some formalists might argue that there is not the sense of control to call these sonnets. Upon close reading, such a staunch critic would clearly see that there is a tightly woven basket that holds the burdens of racism that told successful black people to “stay in their place.” Such a place was presumed to be pre-ordained for black people. When Dungy closes with the title poem, a crown of sonnets shows how all of these poems are vines of the same plant, rooted in varying soils of the American landscape.
In the final sonnet, the speaker states, “only now, in spring, can the place be named.” Such a line eloquently points back to the title that poisonous, nutritious and restorative plants can be found in the same forest. In Dungy’s What To Eat, What to Drink and What to Leave for Poison, spring returns to reclaim lessons that can be gleaned from history to find what is lovable, healthy and admirable about the past.

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

This ambitious collection tackles themes of place, nature, racism and racial violence, knowledge, history (individual and collective, and the relationship between the two), love, and loss. Dungy takes the sonnet form and stretches and stretches it until her form becomes theme: the constraints of canonical literary forms cannot hold those whose ancestors have also been forcibly constrained. Breaking the form while maintaining some of its structure becomes a way to reference the past and transcend it, creating new forms that both gesture to forbears and reveal their limits. She also experiments with point-of-view, taking for her speakers famous individuals from history as well as her own ancestors.

I found too many favorites here, but "Cleaning" is representative of the luminosity of these poems:

"Cleaning"
I learned regret at Mother's sink,
jarred tomatoes, river-mud brown,
a generation old, lumping
down the drain. Hating wasted space,
I had discarded what I could
not understand. I hadn't known
a woman to fight drought or frost
for the promise of winter meals,
hadn't known my great-grandmother,
or what it was to have then lose
the company of that woman
who, upon seeing her namesake,
child of her child, grown and gliding
into marriage, gifted the fruit
of her garden, a hard-won strike
against want. Opening the jar,
I knew nothing of the rotting
effect, the twisting grip of years
spent packing, of years spent moving,
further each time, from known comforts:
a grandmother's garden, her rows
always neat, the harvest: bright wealth
mother hoarded. I understood
only the danger of a date
so old. Understanding clearly
what is fatal to the body,
I only understood too late
what can be fatal to the heart.

I highly recommend this poet and her sparkling and startling poems!

[Patrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are strong poems in this collection. Many of the topics revolve around the family members and family history of the writer. In addition, there are two poems about Ella Fitzgerald, a poem about "Black Boy" from Richard Wright and a wonderfully irreverent poem featuring Jack Johnson, the turn-of-the-century boxer. The structure of the poems focus on line breaks and punctuation to create disturbances and thoughtfulness in the flow of the sentences, many of which are structured like stories. Fragments of Bukowski are evident in the vibe of "What You Want." The Jack Johnson poem "Here's $100, 'Cause I'll Be Coming Back the Other Way" is great introduction for a history lesson, but this is true for many poems in this edition. There is a focus in the text to provide various snapshots of racial incidents in this country, many that directly involve her grandfather Thornton.

[Ross Lockhart · Rating 3 out of 5]

Most contemporary poetry leaves me cold, so I expected more of the same from this collection, particularly since it was school-related reading. Fortunately, I was pleasantly surprised by this assortment of more-or-less sonnets. Camille Dungy’s poetry is personal, emotional, lucid, and active, and is both easy to read and lingering. Good stuff.

[Gerardo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am eager to read some good poetry!

[Glenda Bailey-Mershon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Slicing, fine-edged poems that make you suck in your breath and check your body for marks.

[christy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful collection of poems about family, history, quotidian pleasures and dangers . . .