Our Poet Crush Reveals the Coolest Hotel in the World
Our Poet Crush Reveals the Coolest Hotel in the World
Aimee Nezhukumatathil on her husband’s love letters and creating a teenage hangout house. Plus, the shoes everyone's wearing rn!
Hello! How’s your week going? The weather has been gorgeous here in New York, and I’m excited for a weekend lying on a blanket and people-watching in our neighborhood parks. By the way, does everyone you pass on the street seem to be wearing silver flats right now? I love them!
In today’s issue, our editor Kaitlyn Teer interviews one of our favorite poets and writers, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, about her new book, Bite By Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees, out this week. Each of the book’s 40 short essays focuses on a different food. Whether writing about the bananas she fed her baby sons or the longstanding argument between her South Indian father and Filipina mother over which country produces the sweetest mangoes, Aimee fills her book with lush descriptions and intimate reflections. Here’s a short Q&A between Kaitlyn and Aimee about Bite by Bite…
Did you get hungry while writing the book? Yes! Even while writing about the origins of cinnamon and how the bark is sustainably removed from the trees! For the next month, I put cinnamon in my tea, scones, pancakes, everything.
Were you surprised by how writing about your favorite foods, you ended up writing about your favorite people? Absolutely, I’d start with something like the natural history of vanilla and end up writing about making homemade vanilla extract with my son when he was in kindergarten. Sometimes it became so much about loved ones that food took a backseat!
I love how you weave together personal experiences with research. There is so much sadness and despair in the world, but when wonder is a practice, you feel less alone. I like to keep myself open to learning new things. Maybe there’s a neighbor you don’t have much in common with, but then they give you a tip on how to grow better tomatoes!
The colorful illustrations made reading the book a visual experience, too. I feel so lucky that Fumi Mini Nakamura did the illustrations. She drew halo-halo, one of my favorite Filipino desserts, in a way that somehow it looks like it’s moving! The pieces are tumbling down in this delicious waterfall of a frozen dish. I’m in awe.
Can you tell us about a memorable meal? Many years ago, my husband and I went on a trip abroad without our children. I was a little freaked out to leave them, but then we went to a beautiful restaurant and I had the best risotto of my life. And it was like, we remembered who we were before becoming parents. We can be parents and we can enjoy having a conversation, just the two of us. In that moment, our world shifted.
Aimee lives with her essayist husband, Dustin Parsons, and their two boys in Oxford, Mississippi, where she teaches writing at the University of Mississippi. Here are 13 of her surprises and delights…
Clothing: It’s hard to be in a bad mood when you’re wearing a jumpsuit with big bananas! The pattern is wild, but the quality is great and it’s so flipping comfortable. There are two chapters about bananas in my book, so I wore it to the launch party.
Bookstore: Oxford, Mississippi, where we live, is one of those magical literary towns, where writers are rock stars. When I first moved here, the owners of Square Books already knew me and my work — and it felt like I had the keys to the town square! There was no other place I would have wanted to start my book tour. There were fresh strawberries, and my favorite local Filipino restaurant served the crunchiest lumpia and delicious leche flan.
Friendship: One of my closest poet friends is Ross Gay — we often do events together for our books, and we exchange letters about gardening. (He grows fruits and vegetables, and I grow flowers.) It’s fun to get handwritten mail, and our garden reports even turned into a book of poems.
Secret talent: I joke with Ross about how I was named the ‘Handwriting Champion of Western Kansas’ in a penmanship competition I won in sixth grade. To this day, I’m obsessed with school supplies, including stickers, pens with iridescent inks, and Blackwing pencils (I draft everything in pencil first). And anyone who receives a letter from me gets their name written in calligraphy. (💅🏽: Essie’s ‘Fuel Your Desire’ with confetti topper.)
