Jessica Manack

2023 Sheila-Na-Gig Editions First Chapbook Prize Winner & 2025 Eric Hoffer Award Finalist

Gastromythology
by Jessica Manack

ISBN: 978-1-962405-49-2
$14.00 (+ $4 US Shipping)   

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jessica Manack holds degrees from Hollins University and lives with her family in her hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her writing has appeared widely in anthologies and journals, including Still: The Journal, SWWIM Every Day, and Fine Print, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is a recipient of a 2022 Curious Creators Grant. This is her first book. Keep up with her work at http://www.jessicamanack.com

ABOUT THE BOOK

Jessica Manack’s Gastromythology is a meditation on how the ways we nourish – or fail to nourish – one another can form an origin story. From enjoying it, to shunning it, to becoming it, food is something with which modern girls and women have a complex relationship, all of which is explored unflinchingly in this volume. Through artfully-crafted verse in a variety of forms, Manack takes the reader from the awakenings of sexuality, to the microbiome of a mother’s body, to the disorienting culinary landscape of a new country, all the while pondering the ways a person feeds, and is fed by, their landscape.

ADVANCE PRAISE

Jessica Manack’s delicious debut is poetic archaeology—unearthing the myths of ancestry, motherhood, and all manner of hungers. The poet digs deep and exposes a world where women and girls bear the brunt of family and place (“there was no dinner without someone’s broken back”) yet her myth-busting in these transformative and melodic poems banish shame and fear, revealing instead “something that fills you.” Gastromythology is a feast of poetic forms matched with chic grace, intelligence, and surprise.

–Marianne Worthington, author of The Girl Singerand editor, Still: The Journal

Jessica Manack’s poetry collection, Gastromythology, is all about the things we take in, that we put inside of our minds and bodies. It could be tobacco. It could be peaches, prunes, or alfalfa. It could be mathematics and is most certainly love and power and sadness and grace. The intestines of poetics flare in this collection and so the belly is left full. Full of heart and reconstitution, memory, desire, and home. One might call it a cornucopia of just being together under the good roof of sustenance. It is that taste of tart wheat sharp and sweet on the tongue and this collection is totally ‘worth it.’ But it’s not a matter of worth and more, as Manack writes, The house I built didn’t have a roof until I shouted your name. Gastromythology is that house and these poems are the roof that covers us in our hunger and desire and then fills it all up with the good stuff.

–Matthew Lippman, author of We Are All Sleeping With Our Sneakers On