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From the Standard Cyclopedia of Recipes

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Adapted from a collection of household instructions originally published in 1901, From the Standard Cyclopedia of Recipes bastardizes everyday tasks such as dyeing silks, brewing beer, fabricating paint and, of course, curing small pox and twists them into odd, dark poems. The pains of adolescence, the simple failure of love, the thrill of newfound lust—this collection outlines all the crests and troughs of our modern existence.

From "How to Temper Knife Blades":

There is a piece of iron between us,straight and hard at firstbut we have worked it.Warped the ironuntil it is curved nowto exactly us, fits the shape that lies inus two embracing. A line that runs from where our faces meet,the way we lay our necks on each other, the cut of our embraced torsos,tempered hot iron hips, twine of legs.


90 pages, Paperback

First published December 17, 2013

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B.C. Edwards

4 books9 followers

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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
Profile Image for Andrea Blythe.
Author 10 books80 followers
October 3, 2020
Medicinal shows once toured Europe and America. So called doctors would drive wagons from town to town, offering miracle elixers and other entertainments. My knowledge of medicine shows come from pop culture, the image of a man more entertainer than doctor purporting to sell cures. The man stands on his box or makeshift stage and with a flourish presents a bottle with some strange liquid inside. Is it medicine, a placebo, or poison?

B.C. Edwards’ From the Standard Cyclopedia of Recipes has the same feel of such medicinal shows, with the author himself presenting an assemblage of recipes and concoctions. Each of the poems in this book is an adaptation of a recipe found in a collection of household instructions originally published in 1901 by Frederick J. Drake and Company — recipes to make pure spirits, to cure distemper in horses, to restore burnt steel, to destroy the stumps of trees.

Read the rest of the review on my blog.
336 reviews
March 22, 2021
I read a lot of 19th century medical and scientific texts, including snake oil advertisement pamphlets and endorsements on archive.org and Project Gutenberg, so I definitely get the appeal of appropriating recipe how-tos from obsolete tasks and aesthetics. The language from that time is so evocative—"hog cholera" and "black inclining to purple" dye, even the repetitious "again".

Some of these adaptations excite me. In their specificity, they seem to match the recipe, encouraging us to follow a series of steps and accomplish something. In "How to make Coffee extract," we're asked to consider extract as concentrative and volatile: "This is an instinct/of ours—to assume that to have/a thing, first it must be made/ then derived." Thwarted from its instincts, later it will "attempt a coup." I loved this image of segregation, separation, and oppression emerging from the power dynamic between a distiller and his extract. It succeeds in recontextualizing the recipe.

When the "you" of the recipe-user/reader gives way to a specific character-you, I thought the appropriative techniques weren't as compelling. In "Abscess," the speaker/instructor addresses a biographical second person as they navigate a relationship, hoping to find advice for removing a swelling, a tumor.

By accretion, I liked how the unmet needs of a hundred years ago intersected with new unmet needs, like "homogeny incarnate" as a cure for difference, when originally it would have helped with photography. It gives a sense of always being on the verge of a breakthrough, of a solution, then being thwarted. Questioning whether, through processes understood or misunderstood, change is possible. "There are borders/to our world that we built and they are small but absolute." Crossing these borders is one of the concerns of the recipe-maker.

One place I would have loved to see more experimentalism was in the index. Although some of the entries might be suggestive or humorous, most of the ones I tested were straight-forward. Pumpkin seeds leads to a reference to pumpkin seeds. It would have been a potent place to play with referentiality, orientation, or simply give suggestions for themes, like an entry for colonialism. It's inspiring to see an index even printed at all -- maybe my expectations to always push things to the brink of comprehension aren't worth sacrificing readability.
Profile Image for Lisa Eckstein.
560 reviews32 followers
August 27, 2014
I'm not a frequent poetry reader, but these poems appealed to me, with their playful language and relatable emotions. While the situations described in the poems are strange and fantastical, the truths behind them concern love and childhood and difficult relationships, and I found them more understandable than poetry often is. Many of the poems take the form of an odd set of instructions, and that's because each one is inspired by an item in a 1901 book, The Standard Cyclopedia of Recipes. It's a cool concept, beautifully executed.

A few of the poems are available at Freerange Nonfiction and Lyre Lyre.
Profile Image for Dennis Sweeney.
Author 7 books24 followers
August 4, 2014
Off the wall poems partially appropriated from a book of old time remedies and recipes. The mix of Edwards' Brooklyn with the mechanistic instructions from the original text makes this really interesting interplay between sincere confessional language and earnest but sort of arms-length imagery about process. It's hard to know what to do with these faux-instructions, but that's how poems should be. They left me feeling wrenched, if that makes any sense. Like sense is bigger than I thought it was.
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