Too Much World, Not Enough Chocolate by Peggy Landsman

coming august 2023

Too Much World, Not Enough Chocolate

by Peggy Landsman

Publication Date: 8 August 2023
Nightingale & Sparrow Press

Genre: Poetry

Too Much World, Not Enough Chocolate is a collection of 62 mostly free verse poems divided into two sections.

In Part One, the poet responds to her experiences in the second half of the twentieth century, including growing up with Holocaust survivors, living alone in the woods, protesting the Vietnam War, living and working abroad in Israel, Yugoslavia, Japan, and China; and always responding to sexism, which she understands to be ubiquitous. The last lines of the opening poem sum up the complexity of her feelings:  “At the beginning of the twenty-first century/the thing that still amazes me/is how easily I startle.”

In Part Two, the poet explores the joys and sorrows of personal relationships between friends, family members, and lovers, as well as the deep and magical connection she experiences to her own imagination and art. All the poems in Part Two contain images of particular foods, and through the alchemy of poetry, by the time we get to the last lines of the last poem in the collection, we see the everyday event of eating a bagel transformed into an epiphany: “… the hole in the bagel’s enough/love finds its way/through Openness.”

About the Author

Peggy Landsman is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Our Words, Our Worlds (Kelsay Books, 2021) and To-wit To-woo (Foothills Publishing, 2008). Her work appears in many literary anthologies and journals, including Breathe: 101 Contemporary Odes (C&R Press), Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse (Lost Horse Press), The Ekphrastic ReviewMezzo Cammin, The Offing, and Scientific American. She lives in South Florida where she swims in the warm Atlantic Ocean every chance she gets.

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