In her powerful new collection, Sarah Kennedy draws on the historical record, as well her personal life, to explore relationships and bodies, both physical and textual. Kennedy underscores human frailty in poems that dramatize the lives of British women who kept recipe manuscripts containing both medicinal and culinary "receipts" during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These women often recorded their frustrations and triumphs as both doctors and household managers for their families, and their trials with illness, childbearing, and aging resonate with contemporary poems about the...