prison recipes - Poems by Jeremy Paden

Publication Date: June 1, 2018
Paperback Chapbook, 40 pages
ISBN: 978-1-937968-47-2

Available from Small Press Distribution

Jeremy Paden’s latest chapbook once again imagines the lives of people trapped in darkness—in this case the man-made darkness of political imprisonment in Chile and Argentina. Paden provides an unflinching and harrowing account of survival in the face of the most extreme brutality (carried out by regimes, let us not forget, abetted by the US and other Western powers), of the means by which prisoners sustain not only the body, but the spirit. Accounts of making “sock cheese”, of bread pudding flavored by strawberry toothpaste, or the necessity of extracting every virtue from a single lemon, emerge as recipes for resistance.

In one poem Paden asks, “can a songbird sing in a vacuum”? This little volume is the answer: Yes, they sing—but they can only be heard if those of us on the outside will echo their songs as loudly and long as we can. And we must.

Praise for Jeremy Paden's prison recipes:

Jeremy Paden’s poems are a help to me as I work to understand what it means to be fully human. While each poem in prison recipes underscores there’s nothing one human won’t do to another, each poem also argues, through glorious language, that we do have the capacity to treat each other compassionately.

—Kathleen Driskell, author of Blue Etiquette

A beautiful collection of poems that speaks for the disappeared, the murdered, and the tortured men and women whose lives were shattered by Latin America’s Southern Cone dictatorships. An artisan of words and captivating imagery, Jeremy Paden reconstructs not only the pain, the agony, and the voices that were forever silenced but also a language of hope against “the powers of this world,” and songs and melodies that defy violence and historical amnesia.

—Oswaldo Estrada, Professor of Latin American Literature,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Jeremy Paden’s prison recipes provides deft commentary on Argentina’s “Dirty War,” demonstrating how even while incarcerated under the auspices of state terrorism, people, not unlike water, find a way. In Paden’s collection, survival isn’t just a matter of staying nourished physically. Sometimes survival is about remaining sane in the midst of insanity. It’s about finding comfort and remembering one’s own story over breaking bread with others, or in some cases, making bread pudding when even a simple mate can’t be had. Paden is at his best with this collection, serving as a kind of Ganymede to the stories of intellects and artists imprisoned during this war. These poems are urgent and unflinching as they interrogate humanity in the face of horror. The answer, as Paden surmises, has much to do with even a single voice lifting to declare, I sing/not just to sing/not just because my voice is good/I sing/I sing because….

—Bianca Lynne Spriggs, Affrilachian Poet

“Some words / are better left as acts...” (prison recipes), but you will be glad the words in these poems were left as words. That lead to action. If you are a lover of green words and austral shores, if you would like to learn how to make sock cheese and multiply breadcrumbs, you have found your book.

—Edward Stanton, author of Wide as the Wind

Jeremy Dae Paden was born in Milan, Italy and raised in Central America and the Caribbean. He received his PhD in Latin American literature at Emory University and is Professor of Spanish at Transylvania University and also on faculty in Spalding’s low-residency MFA, where he teaches literary translation. He is the author of two other chapbooks: Broken Tulips (Accents Press, 2013) and Delicate Matters (Winged City Press, 2016). The latter collection is comprised of translations. His poems and translations have appeared in such journals as Adirondack Review, Asymptote Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, California Quarterly, Cortland Review, Drunken Boat, Hampden-Sydney Review, Louisville Review, Rattle, and Words without Borders, to name a few. He is a member of the Affrilachian Poets and resides in Lexington, Kentucky.