Jim Linnell

The Menu: a Diary of Days Jim Linnell

We tell our story as a series of tables set in front of us. From one table setting to another we accumulate knowledge, relationships, mistakes. But we eat because we are hungry. The table set before us doesn?t always match our hunger. Every holiday table contains the fault lines of the appetites that drive families, couples, and their ghosts. The poems in The Menu evoke the driven progress of a life. We are creatures of appetite and fear. The debris trail we leave trying to satisfy our hunger is unpredictable, complicated. This tale divides into six sections: It Starts, He, She, She Meets He, You?re It Asshole, and Startled. Scenes of need and desire form a landscape of despair and joy ? the sensuality of connection that animates a life. Words trace a diary of days: images and feeling smudged, marked and torn as it opens to our intimacy. Both rhapsodic and blunt, lyrical and sharp we are revealed gaping at beauty, how we swagger and yell, stagger over the line lifted up or cast down ? a progress of falling. What we eat, what we will taste, consume, or be consumed by is known and unknown. The Menu defies the belief that your story fits in your pocket. If we are lucky it tears a hole and we fall ? again.