Recipe for a Funeral by Mary Eichbauer

The poems in Recipe for a Funeral are rich and dark, laden with both the sweetness and the sadness of the world. Here you will meet a host of lost souls, people on the fringe, from childhood friends to the freaks of Coney Island. Eichbauer’s poetry reveals these characters as they struggle in an unfair world. But treasured family and friends make appearances as well, bringing a love of nature and a love of language along with them. At times it feels as if afternoon sunlight, shadowed by the full leaves of late summer, casts shapes across these poems. Every gift, every sweet moment of meditation, is mitigated by thoughts of farewell. Clear-eyed and determined, funny and sad at once, these poems bring us home, reminding us, and all lost souls, that “the world/doesn’t have to be the way it is now.”

–Bob Stanley, Sacramento Poet Laureate 2009–2012, author of Language Barrier (CW Books, 2024)

Mary Eichbauer’s Recipe for a Funeral is a rich brioche of a chapbook, one to sit with and digest with a cup of tea or strong coffee. These poems address the spectrum of life from early childhood to elderhood, with a stop at motherhood and child-rearing. Each poem bears gifts of tangible and symbolic richness: eggs fresh from the coop, gathered by grandchildren, freaks at a sideshow, and poems as recipes culled from a long life, whose fruit stains decorate their pages. Many endings hit with the force of a hammer on steel. This is a fine collection, one to read and reread.

–Sandra Anfang, author of Rara Avis: for the birds (Kelsay Books, 2024)

Mary Eichbauer’s work is distinctive, edgy, “dark,” at some distance from the bundle of roses we usually refer to as “poetry.” You keep putting it aside, hoping to escape from the secrets it unflinchingly reveals, but you always return to it because you know there is always more. If you want to find out what Sicilian women know, it is all here. But take care: you are touching the real.

–Jack Foley, Poet and radio personality