From K But there is a photograph of me as a girl standing at the stove with a splotch of grease on the front of my dress, holding a spatula.

My hipcocked, a grown-up look on my face.

I've always felt a power larger than myself while cooking.

I learned how to cook by saying nothing, watching how each ingredient was managed.

But so much of the art of cooking lies in the body.

I gain knowledge about the spirit of the cooks who came before me,

the rhythm in the way they sloshed the greens in the sink,

removed a pot seconds before it burned, drew a knife close enough to the finger to

hold the vegetable tautaut but never cut themselves.

A kind of electric excitement passed through me when I watched Granny Cook.

Even now, I don't know what to call it, but there was grace and

poise in her kitchen dance.

That is the prose you get when you marry a poet to material of her own

lineage with stories and memories of time spent in kitchens and at the stove.

In Crystal Wilkinson's extraordinary book,

Praise Song for the Kitchen Ghosts,

the former poet laureate of Kentucky

teases out a complex web of attachment to Black Apalachia and those who came before.

I'm thrilled to have Crystal on Good Food.

Welcome to Good Food, Crystal.

Thank you.

Thank you for having me.

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