In Kara Candito's prize-winning debut collection a "garish/human theatre" comes to life against richly textured geographic and psychic landscapes. These poems are high-speed meditations on a world where Walter Benjamin meets the "glitzy chain-link of Chanel scarves" and Puccini's "Tosca "meets the din of the Times Square subway station. Ferociously witty and intensely lyrical, "Taste of Cherry" speaks to us in a language that is simultaneously private and public, sensual and cerebral.

Kara Candito's work has appeared in such journals as Gulf Coast, Blackbird, Prairie Schooner, Nimrod, Best New Poets 2007, and the Florida Review. She has been awarded scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference and the Florida State University College of Arts and Sciences Foundation. She has an MFA from the University of Maryland and is currently a PhD candidate and instructor at Florida State University.

Acknowledgments

One

Self-Portrait with an Ice Pick

La Bufera: Our Last Trip to Sicily

Floristic Elegy for the Year I Lived with You in Coconut Grove

Notes for a Novice Flâneur

Postcard: I've Been Meaning to Write--

Egypt Journal: The Poet's Condition

Egypt Journal: Christmas at the Great Pyramid

Two. Portraits

Carnivale, 1934

Epic Poem Concerning the Poet's Coming of Age as Attis

Gilead Red

Girl in the Grass

Three

Taste of Cherry

Barely Legal: Upon Finding My Father's Porn

A Necessary Fiction

He Was Only Half as Beautiful

California

Sleeping with René Magritte

Polarity

Strange Zippers: A Poem in Which the Heroine _______

The Fitting

On the Occasion of Our Argument During a 1 Best Power Ballads Countdown

Last Happiness

Notes