Catherine Daly is a former teacher, of History of Mathematics and other things, and former software developer. She is author of DaDaDa (Salt, 2003), Locket (Tupelo, 2005), and the forthcoming Secret Kitty (Ahadada), Paper Craft (Moria), To Delite and Instruct (blue lion books), and Chanteuse/Cantatrice (factoryschool). After finishing these cooking poems, she will make paper out of poems.
Notes: As for the poems, there are three kinds here; they are all titled according to the “recipe” for making them, and this part is pretty obvious (like larding is larding but with words not meat and fat, chop is chopping up text), but perhaps less obvious, the collages are made from print outs of public domain American cookbooks written by women, generally pages or recipes which have a relationship to the preparation technique employed (knife work, dough handling, etc.); then, these collages are “read” into poems, making these poems the logical successor of some in Paper Craft, which contains readings of objects made from printed paper pages.
The “text only” poems with a single quote are also sourced in women’s cooking and related writing, but generally a computer-aided technique has been applied to mimic the cooking technique, rather than cut-up and collage. The text poems with two quotes combine women’s writing and poetry which relates to food or cooking in some way; these are accordingly closer to language as spoken.