Poems for Supper
Published on 12. June 2026
Book
Paperback/Softback
34 pages
979-8-89990-514-8 (ISBN)
Description
Poems for Supper is a lyrical memoir in verse-a "poemoir" blending poetry and lived experience-tracing a decades-long marriage shaped by love, separation, illness, travel, and reconciliation.
Set between America and Japan, these intimate poems move through cherry blossom seasons, kitchens, hospital rooms, gardens, and distant cities, charting the emotional terrain of a relationship tested by time, distance, and change.
Drawing on Japanese aesthetics and themes of impermanence, resilience, and repair, the collection reflects on how love endures through rupture and transformation. Inspired in part by kintsugi-the Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics with gold-the poems suggest that what is broken is not lost, but reshaped.
Honest, reflective, and deeply personal, Poems for Supper offers readers a sustained meditation on memory, marriage, aging, and emotional survival in a changing world.
More details
Person
Leah Stenson is the author of several poetry collections including Heavenly Body (2011), The Turquoise Bee and Other Love Poems (2014), and Everywhere I Find Myself (2017), as well as the memoir Life Revised (2020). She is co-editor of Reverberations from Fukushima: 50 Japanese Poets Speak Out (2014), First Place Poetry winner at the Pacific Rim Book Festival and USA Best Book Awards finalist in Social Change, and Alive at the Center (2013). She hosts the long-running Studio Series Poetry Reading and Open Mic, a monthly literary event devoted exclusively to poets for more than a decade. She lives in Oregon, dividing her time between Portland and the Hood River Valley.