The Convert’s Heart is Good to Eat by Melody S. Gee
Driftwood Press, 2022
Beautifully rendered, Melody S. Gee’s chapbook The Convert’s Heart is Good to Eat packs religion, family, food, and motherhood into fourteen tender poems. Religious imagery pierces the page right beside quiet meditations. Of love between sisters, neither biblical nor hers, Gee writes, “What was / never mine is still somehow mine to give, / can somehow be divided among us.” The metaphors in this collection serve as reminder that, try our damnedest, we can never separate the everyday from the spiritual.
Ritual rises from the metaphors in every stanza, but so too does the smell of restaurants and elementary school classrooms. In “Conditions,” Gee flashes to the mundane by creating a familiar-feeling scene—paper towel bean sprouts in second grade science. In the same breath, comparing the convert to the unsprouted bean, she writes, “By winter, I already knew how to eat / my armor.” While religion is necessarily a theme in a collection about conversion, so too is fertility and growth. The themes are so intertwined in these poems, one cannot seem to tell them apart. Gee remembers her own daughter’s cells forming at the same time that she remembers herself growing from child, to person, to mother. Side by side, the imagery works wonders. Gee recounts snippets from her own childhood—memories formed by the immigrant experience. Here are poems that reek so fiercely of the past that one can taste it.
If, like some of us, you are a lapsed Catholic, you will devour The Convert’s Heart is Good to Eat. If, like Melody S. Gee, you are a Catholic convert, you will devour all fourteen poems. If you have never once sat and considered Catholicism and its ceremony, you will devour the imagery on each page. In short, no matter who you are, Melody S. Gee’s new chapbook has something for you.
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Mary Ansell is a high school teacher who lives, writes, and ruminates in Gainesville, Florida. Her reviews have also been published in The Inflectionist Review.