A Fish to Feed All Hunger

Sandra Alcosser

In A Fish to Feed All Hunger, nature follows its inevitable yet beautiful course towards decay. These poems are peopled with souls who either embrace the beauty and mystery of this life cycle or vainly struggle against it. But always life’s decay takes on the colorful images of rust, lichen, brilliant fungi, peacock moths, and faded photographs. As she observes in her poem “He Didn’t Speak,” nature's colors don't fade with the passing of time as one might expect: “Images grown more brilliant each year/ as lichen do when they eat stone, dissolving/ the color within, breaking it to pieces.”

A sample poem from the book

The Trap

For Christmas I gave him a jar

of three-fruit marmalade made

with barley water. He spooned it

after dinner, admiring the color

of pore and rind.

Once again we slept together

back to back, husband and wife.

All night I wanted to turn, open

my arms, but I remembered last summer,

alone in the new place, how I watched

a mouse lick soft brie from a trap

I’d set. The spring was rusty. It took

a long time to snap.