Breaking Bread

Christine Adams offers a feast for the eye, ear, and mind. These poems of family, friendships, places, seasons, and the pleasures of reading and language comprise the bread that Adams bakes and shares with the reader "to eat," to be fulfilled.

-George Witte, author, An Abundance of Caution

Breaking Bread warns that some of us are "burning daylight here, when we should be making hay." With cutting restraint, Christine L. Adams has created a concoction of "true purpose," "spun sugar," and "the monotony of enduring, marked by one more cup of coffee." Brilliant and relevant!

-Sharon Dennis Wyeth, author, Black Eye

Christine L. Adams's Breaking Bread not only makes me hungry for this delicious life, but also for the grit, darkness, and mystery of it. She does this with levity borne of sarcasm and wit. Every spoonful reveals a poet who effortlessly blends elevated thought into truth. This is a book of tension and stunning observation, especially in her poems about motherhood: "let the wound / open to the air, to heal, to scar, / to usher in the light our clouded eyes craved," and a pandemic poem that harkens back to the days "on our porches looking for ways to / quietly memorialize all that we / neglected, took for granted, / and lost." Let us quietly memorize the wisdom found here and lose none of it.

-Marcia LeBeau, author, A Curious Hunger

Christine L. Adams organizes Breaking Bread like a French menu. There is a whimsical evocation of French phrases that locate the poet's intelligence in wit and refinement. So when we get, in the opening section called "Les Amuse Bouches," a folky toast, or a locution like "my marry 'em and bury 'em / suit," we're entertained by a comic. In the last sections, "Les Plats" and "Les Desserts," Adams gets more personal, talking directly with the people she loves. Sometimes, the poet acknowledges, you can't deal with the details. In "Sedum," the speaker's grandmother "assigned the same / name to every granddaughter: / Simplifying them all to a collective: / Susie Q." You might expect a poet so attentive to her antecedents to be unhappy in the bucket of Susie Q's, but Adams looks out and sees "a rising / moon, forever waxing, whose / touch was enduring as Love."

-Frank Rubino, author, Frank's Lunch Service