Claire Sherwood, Eat Your Words

Claire Sherwood’s Eat your words chapbook came out with James Hawes’ Turret House Press in 2024.

Claire Sherwood is a Montreal writer, visual poet and oral storyteller. Her poetry has appeared in Kola Magazine, Zettel Magazine, and carte blanche magazine, among others. Her collage-poems and storytelling work have appeared in many other places unfamiliar to me, but she runs in different circles than most, I gather.

Claire Sherwood thanks Sarah Burgoyne for the spark and encouragement to produce these poems in the acknowledgements section of her work.

The chapbook is a single poem that is a catechism without question marks (except a few, for ironic effect). It’s not rhetorical per se. But a statement nonetheless. It’s deadpan, it’s ad nauseum.

Let’s read:

“Is it seasonal"

Fantastic first line. Prim, proper, snooty, snobby, it says something.

“Is it local”

Claire Sherwood is a local Montrealer.

“Is it organic”

They should have a Razzie for words.

These lines are just starting off lines, though. Sherwood eventually riffs right into herself, and the first page ends with these beautiful two lines:

Is it a martini equivalent to six marshmallow negligible protein
Is it herring nine grams of protein healthier than a martini

Yes, although typically, the martini comes before the herring in my books.

Before I get into the second page of the poem, I have to read what’s in the back of the book.

Her references are two: Joy of Cooking and her mother’s cookbook, Purity Cook Book 875 Tested Recipes.

You know? It’s funny the things the world takes from you. I had my mother’s cookbook, not that it ever did me any good. I not only remember the book (The Good Housekeeping Illustrated, 1980) but also her cooking—nothing I couldn’t recreate from scratch. We used to cook together all the time.

Now, I make food with avocado, grapeseed oil, and imported cheese. I also use different techniques—things neither of us did. I got really into oven-roasted tin foil-wrapped artichokes, brining, and butter-basting. My mom would be impressed. I think about it a lot.

Not that she followed those recipes anyways. But I frequent book fairs, and I see the same book all the time—not Claire Sherwood’s mother’s cookbook, but mine. It’s never occurred to me to acquire another copy. There’s nothing in there of hers anyway—no orzo, no sloppy joes, no homemade pizza. True, Good Housekeeping Illustrated has recipes for those things, but not the way she made them.

I may sound callous, but it’s not my intent. All this to say: I gather that not only has Claire really looked at her mother’s cookbook, but that she knows the relevant parts. This is an extremely intimate poem she’s inviting us into, extremely vulnerable, with puns, pop song lyrics, and things that either make you go “Oh yeah” or “Oh...”

How could I forget? She also gives us two paragraphs beforehand:

This poem is an interrogation of memory, a fluid autobiography. Swirling with intergenerational flavours and aromas. Stirring, blending, beating, scraping the sides of the bowl to find the right words. Struggling with separation, painful endings. Searching for home.

This is a poem struggling to be a poem. Words are impossible to control. Nothing is static. Memory continually reorders and reframes archived slices of the past. Loops and lines write the story. Is it leftovers? Am I home?

This poem really isn’t about what I’ve been yapping about. I think it’s more intimate, more vulnerable. It’s a cure-all, it’s a catch-all, it’s an everything bagel, but the everything is kitchen lore, and the bagel is Montreal-style:

Is it east of west of
Is it the Poolroom steamies all-dressed one in each hand
Is it served at Beauty’s their Bonjour
Is it the Pam-Pam over coffee
Is it the Carmen goulash soup
Is it Mordecai’s Main Duddy Wilensky’s
Is it fried salami-bologna squashed on a kaiser slathered in mustard
Is it Schwartz’s Hebrew Delicatessen smoked meat nothing but
Is it reminiscent of Leonard
Is it hopelessly devoted
Is it Mavis’s Golden Square Mile
Is it Gabrielle’s Saint-Henri
Is it Viau’s chocolate Whippet
Is it the Biscuiterie hello condos good-bye Whippets

I don’t know. I don’t know Claire Sherwood’s mother, but maybe that’s the point of this poem. Affirmation. It was never about the food, after all. The great allower, the great mover-on: cooking.

The best thing my mother ever did in the kitchen was innovate. I think of her every time I do something new. That’s what this poem reminds me of, and I appreciate it.

Or, as Sherwood puts it:

Is it infinitely expandable like love or hate
Is it all’s well that ends in devil’s food cake