Process:
Over the past year, I have been sourcing poems from cookbooks, pulling from the experience of working as a butcher and employing the metaphor of book as body to explore human-animal relations and questions of agency. The presence of the palimpsest is essential to my relationship with found poetry and the form that the collage takes—incorporating the page, or carcass, from which the poem is sourced. This is especially important to me in considering the relationship between animals and food, as the palimpsest of the page is the signifier for the absent referrent of the body.

I chose to engage with the piece Turning, and the overall theme of cream, by generating a found poem using the “ABOUT MILK” page of Joy of Cooking (Rombauer 1931) in order to adopt the specific language used to explain milk pasteurization and notions of safety. The foregrounded object of Turning informed a direction in my piece toward an abject read of the language of milk. Subsequently, the ermine manifested in the splitting of “und-ermined” as a result of the palette of Turning and the visual textures of the foreground. The ermine brought with it its own symbolism of purity and moderation while also presenting insight to the shadow-self of the speaker as one inclined toward escape.
—Kylie Gellatly

Kylie Gellatly is a poet and the author of The Fever Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2021). Her visual poems are recently published or forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Diode, Tupelo Quarterly, Tab Journal, The Hunger, and elsewhere. Kylie has received support from the Vermont Studio Center and the Juniper Writing Institute. She is a Frances Perkins Scholar at Mount Holyoke College and is the Editor-in-Chief of the Mount Holyoke Review.
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