Alchemy of Yeast and Tears - signed copy
This collection of original poetry explores the griefs and joys of motherhood and daughterhood as the poet navigates her mother’s death and the challenge of raising children in a broken world.
The collection received multiple honors before publication, including finalist in the Jessie Bryce Niles chapbook competition and finalist in the Headlight Review chapbook contest.
This collection of original poetry explores the griefs and joys of motherhood and daughterhood as the poet navigates her mother’s death and the challenge of raising children in a broken world.
The collection received multiple honors before publication, including finalist in the Jessie Bryce Niles chapbook competition and finalist in the Headlight Review chapbook contest.
This collection of original poetry explores the griefs and joys of motherhood and daughterhood as the poet navigates her mother’s death and the challenge of raising children in a broken world.
The collection received multiple honors before publication, including finalist in the Jessie Bryce Niles chapbook competition and finalist in the Headlight Review chapbook contest.
33 pages, published in 2023 by Kelsay Books
Advance Praise for Alchemy of Yeast and Tears:
“Patricia Davis-Muffett’s alchemy of yeast and tears is a self-aware collection that vacillates from yearning to wildness. These poems marvel through close attention. We are instructed about the tyranny of time. Loss interweaves with what it means to mother. There is an underlying theme questioning how we can hold our grief. From ‘Night Terrors’: “The person you were will die. / I hope the new one is strong, / fierce enough to survive.” How do we balance this desire to mend without letting slip the sacred remembrances of our past? The poet suggests what we can try to do. Because trying matters.”
~ Mark Danowsky (Editor-In-Chief, ONE ART: a journal of poetry)
“In her captivating collection, “alchemy of yeast and tears,” Patricia Davis-Muffett lays bare the world of motherhood and daughterhood with a voice from the crossroads of these states. From what is passed “from hand to hand” across generations to choices that have no easy options, these poems offer us the compassionate and fiery voice of experience. These poems, like the leatherback turtle featured in “Never enough,” “plant hope” in the shifting sands of responsibility, love, celebration, and especially grief, in its multitude of guises.”
~ Merie Kirby (author of The Thumbelina Poems and The Dog Runs On)
“Patricia Davis-Muffett dedicates this tenderly touching chapbook to a mother who taught her anything was possible. In “What to do with your grief III,” she proclaims I do what my mother taught me./Butter. Sugar. Flour. Salt./I bring this to you./…This piece of my day./I am doing what I know.” What the poet knows is that yeast and tears are inherent in all forms of mother/child relationships. Whether focused on a dying mother, the challenges presented by children, or the maternal impulses of leatherbacks, jellyfish, elephants and orcas, Davis-Muffett’s poems are exquisitely rendered in language that touches the heart as it delights the mind. This chapbook is a gift to those who love authentic poetry.
––Carolyn Martin, Ph.D., Poetry editor, Kosmos Quarterly: journal for global transformation.