Patricia Wixon, Dear Spoon

Dear Spoon, by Patricia Wixon

Dear Spoon features poems that focus on people and food: how food brings people and cultures together, the pleasures of cooking, baking, and preserving food, food for ceremonies and holidays, and the supremacy of chocolate. The second half of Dear Spoon gathers recipes from five generations of Wixon’s extended family from the early 1900s to the present.

I wash the red globes, bite one to test its crunchiness, feel the quick
prick on my tongue as the flavor sharpens. I start slicing down
a skin, twirl the radish between each slice to create a rose.
Then another, until I have a garden of red petals inset with white—
and it’s ready: a fresh salad of radishes all by themselves.

—from "At the Market"

Here's what Ralph Salisbury and Ingrid Wendt have to say about Wixon's unique book.

“This book’s language is as crisp and fresh as the radishes in this poem. Patricia Wixon evokes the people who provided the recipes and some of the life situations associated with them. The writing is a delight and makes the recipes memorable.”
–Ralph Salisbury, recipient of the 2015 Charles Erskine Scott Wood
Distinguished Writer Award

“What a delicious treat Patricia Wixon offers us: poems that richly honor, celebrate, and bring to life colorful uncles and aunts, parents and grandparents—poems crafted with wisdom and skill and love—and five generations of handed-down, treasured, family recipes I can hardly wait to try. Lucky the extended family for whom this book is a gift! Lucky the rest of us who inherit it, too!
–Ingrid Wendt, winner of the Oregon Book Award in Poetry

Patricia Wixon is the author of Airing the Sheets and Side Effects. Her poems have appeared in Hubbub, The Cressett, Windfall, Cascadia Review, and other literary journals, and in six anthologies, most recently A Ritual to Read Together. Since her retirement as a teacher and school administrator, she has helped bring well-known writers from across the country to Southern Oregon to give public readings and workshops to students and teachers. She and her husband, Vince Wixon, have been longtime poetry editors for Jefferson Monthly. They received Oregon’s 2014 Stewart H. Holbrook Literary Legacy Award.