USA Today recently wrote an article on Kate Lebo’s, A Commonplace Book of Pie, which features recipes and poems. The article indicates that some of the poems give explanations of the pie eater’s personality based on their choice of pie:
The poem attached to peanut-butter pie is, in its entirety, “If you love peanut butter pie, you are either Dolly Parton or someone who loves her.”
Devoted to banana cream pie? “Banana cream-pie lovers appreciate the sum of their parts, so they enjoy the unphotogenic angles of their love: the crumb mess, the toothache wakefulness, warm nights of weakness spent sugarbuzzed.” The raspberry pie lover is “Barbie-toed and steel-footed, a mystery of high heels and eyeshadow”; the one who covets cherry pie “likes sun hats, tolerates baseball, and does not go to church, but prays when she is afraid of failure or death.”
I could see myself coming to the book for the poems and staying for the pie, while some might come for the pie and stay for the poems; either way, this is an interesting and hunger-inspiring combo.
I previously read about Lebo a few years ago when she was staying at the American Gothic house in Iowa and I was just amazed that the house from the painting actually existed and in Iowa. She opened Pie School in Seattle “as a sarcastic retort to people who wondered out loud what Lebo might actually do with a master’s degree in poetry and an aptitude for pie”. I see no harm in adding “open a pie school” to my list of post-MFA possibilities.
Check out the book trailer:
