Stolen Plums

The poems in Alice Turski’s ravenous and playful Stolen Plums explore the ways we consume and are consumed by those we love and the histories they embody. Poignantly navigating uncertainties of self, country, and family, Turski contemplates the precarities of immigration, belonging, matrilineage, and marriage in unsparing language that straddles the border between ode and elegy.  She captures not only a world “ready to eat whatever / you can bear abandoning,” but also the desire animating “tines of light that make [a] tense face beautiful.” Stolen Plums is a singular and singularly voracious debut.