Recipes and Poems
by Traci Brimhall
Hi, I’m Traci Brimhall, Poet Laureate of Kansas and here today to talk about the book Eat Your Words: A Kansas Poetry Cookbook. It’s a collection of recipes and poems I helped edit that collected 20 recipes from 20 chefs across the great state of Kansas, from urban centers to small towns, from restaurants to farms to food trucks. All these great chefs offered up delicious recipes that can be small snacks, hearty meals or treats for your sweet tooth.
I asked 20 poets to take inspiration from the food they were paired with and to create something inspired by the meal itself or one of the ingredients. They showed me how much emotional range can be found in bierocks, how much joy can be found in the mess of baking, and how we can connect to both ourselves and our communities with each meal.
Today, I’d love to share with you the poem “That One Summer” by Luisa Muradyan. The recipe she had was for Late Summer Tomato Jam, which came from Grant Wagner of Fly Boy Brewery and Eats in Sylvan Grove, KS. He developed the recipe years ago so he could have summer-esque BLT’s year round. He recommends baking your own sourdough if you can, substituting fresh heirloom tomatoes for the canned variety if you have them, and toasting the dry spices in a hot sauté pan to activate the oils in them to increase the flavors that will go into the jam. You can read more about the recipe in the cookbook, but now here is Luisa Muradyan’s “That One Summer.”
There was that one summer
when we decided we were garden people
and we went to the store where garden people go
and wandered around the way garden people do
and came home with tomato seeds and fertilizer
and gloves and rakes and a sign made out of wooden planks
that was once a part of a barn door that now says Home.
We shoveled and seeded the plot of dirt behind our house
and knew that something beautiful would grow.
When it didn’t, we tried to retrace our steps
and worked to understand what went wrong.
We read manuals and watched videos
brought in new soil and more seeds
we even joined a gardening grief group
where we sat in circles and talked
about the rain. We kept living our lives
alongside the empty garden. There was
of course the day you got desperate
and brought home the tub
of cherry tomatoes and I knew that it was a lost
cause. They didn’t sprout and the mud started
bleeding, you could not walk into the house
without dirtying the floors. It took us
days to get rid of the garden
though we kept the sign as a reminder
of what could have been.
We aren’t garden people, you sighed
and as I held you we grew closer
in our emptiness.
I love that that poem is about a failure of gardening rather than its great success. I am a failed gardener myself, so I really appreciate hearing that it doesn’t always go right. There is something delicious in what we learn along the way. This poem feels like a recipe for the bad seasons where what nourishes us is when we hold each other.
That poem is by Luisa Muradyan, who is the author of I Make Jokes When I'm Devastated (SMU Bridwell Press, 2025) and American Radiance (University of Nebraska Press). She won the 2017 Prairie Schooner Book Prize and is a member of the Cheburashka Collective—a collective of Ukrainian American writers. Her work has also appeared in The Threepenny Review and The Sun. She lives in Eastern Kansas where she teaches high school English.
Thank you for being with us to talk for a moment about Eat Your Words: A Kansas Poetry Cookbook. I’m Traci Brimhall, Poet Laureate of Kansas, coming to you from Manhattan, Kansas, the “Little Apple.”
