The Book of Scented Things collects poems reflecting the experience of selected vials of perfume.
What if 100 contemporary American poets were sent individually selected vials of perfume, fragrances chosen to reflect the authors’ voices, aesthetics, or writerly obsessions? What if each poet wrote something new in response? The Book of Scented Things edited by Jehanne Dubrow and Lindsay Lusby collects the results of this strange, aromatic experiment: poems of longing and of childhood memory, poems of place and philosophy and politics, poems about the challenge of writing poems about perfume. This is an anthology whose words will linger on your pulse points long after even the base notes have faded.
The Chicago Tribune comments: “Some of the poems are epic in their ambitions, like Nick Lantz’s “If Scent Is the Trigger of Memory, This Is What America Remembers,” which is populated by “Texas oilmen,” “bison” and “a boatful of unwashed pilgrims / parked off the New England coast.” Others are more intimate, like Carrie Jerrell’s “Little Elegy for a Childhood Friend.””
In the age of internet and online writing, Eddie Bulliqui at Basenotes created more recently Scent Verse.Â
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