Displeasures of the Table: Memoir as Caricature

by Martha Ronk

A delightfully comic and serious trip through food by a woman who finds eating it not This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 189229544X
• ISBN13: 9781892295446
• Release Date: July 2009
• Publisher: Green Integer
• Length: 132 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 4.3" x 6.1"

Customer Reviews

curmudgeonly food writing, in a good way

A wonderful little prose work by a respected L.A. poet. Maybe it's "quirky memoir." Maybe it's prose poetry. Maybe it's food writing. All I know is that it's a collection of short-form memoirs (most a page or less) centered around food but written by someone who sort of hates food, or at least sitting at the table. I heard her speak about this book once. She said that when she was first asked to write a food column for a lit. mag., she protested: "But I hate food." Their response? "That's why you'd be perfect." My kind of food writing. I keep telling people about this book and so far no one has heard of it--the same thing used to happen when I brought up her L.A. cohort, D.J. Waldie, whose "Holy Land" is an American classic.

Quirky compendium of bite-sized morsels.

In this tidy little book of memoir/meditation, Martha Ronk surveys the field, "from soup to nuts," of memorable or at least remembered foods. Although Ronk claims that she "doesn't much like eating or cooking either for that matter," she does indeed fashion some delectable taste treats for her readers, wresting pleasure from "displeasure" with her evocative language. Food here is a starting point rather than a destination. And any particular food can lead in many directions. A great little book to have at hand to read in snippets, for example, at the breakfast table, on the bus, or while checking out the refrigerator.