The Midtown Scholar Bookstore is honored to welcome local author Adrienne Su to Harrisburg for a conversation and signing on her new book, Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet. Su will be in conversation with author Siobhan Phillips. This event is free and open to the public. Book signing to follow discussion.
To enter the signing line, books must be purchased from the Midtown Scholar Bookstore. Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event, or you may preorder a copy of the book for pickup/shipment. Signed books may not be available for pickup/shipment until after the author’s appearance.
In this enchanting collection of essays and interviews, poet Adrienne Su reflects on her journey as a creative writer and avid home cook, beginning at a neighbor's dinner table in 1980s Atlanta—lingering over poems, poets, and connections between food and literature—and ending in her 2023 kitchen in central Pennsylvania.
In Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet, Adrienne Su contemplates her own use of food as a recurring metaphor, influential teachers and peers, the push and pull between cooking and writing, changing expectations around English usage, and craft questions such as: Why does some subject matter refuse to cooperate in the creative process, even when it appears close to home? How does one write a good poem about being happy? Why write in rhyme when it's time-consuming and mostly out of style? What is a poem's responsibility to the literal truth?
Su's essays are driven by the tensions between worlds that overlap and collide: social conventions of the northern and southern United States; notions of what's American and what's Asian American; the demands of the page and the demands of the home; the solitariness of writing and the meaningful connection a poem can create between writer and reader. In interviews, often with fellow poets, she discusses a range of topics, from her early days in the Nuyorican poetry-slam scene to the solace of poetry and cooking during Covid-19 lockdown.
While Su’s previous books are all collections of poetry, she has been publishing individual essays for many years. Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet gathers the best of them into one volume for the first time.
About the Authors:
Adrienne Su is the author of five books of poems, most recently Peach State (2021), which was named a 2022 Book All Georgians Should Read. Her poems appear in many anthologies, including five volumes of The Best American Poetry. Among her awards are an NEA fellowship and residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Yaddo, and The Frost Place. An Atlanta native, she lives in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where she is professor of creative writing at Dickinson College.
Siobhan Phillips is a Rhodes Scholar who studied English Literature at Yale and Oxford Universities and Poetry at the University of East Anglia before earning her PhD in English Language and Literature from Yale. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, Artforum, Aeon, and elsewhere. An associate professor of English at Dickinson College, she lives in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Benefit is her first novel.
