Amanda Gunn — Ordinary Sugar

Poetry Unbound

A note from the Poetry Unbound team:
We’ve updated the audio for our episode “Amanda Gunn — Ordinary Sugar.” This updated version includes an additional stanza initially omitted from the recording and additional reflection from Pádraig.

How can russet potatoes be made to taste of sugar and caramel? By dedication, love, and craft. Amanda Gunn places her poetry in conversation with the farming and culinary skills of her forebears: women who cultivated land, survival, strength, and family bonds.

Amanda Gunn grew up just at the edge of the woods in southern Connecticut with two older brothers. She is the author of Things I Didn’t Do with This Body (Copper Canyon Press, 2023). Gunn is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, as well as a PhD candidate in English at Harvard, where she studies poetry, ephemerality, and Black pleasure. Her recent work appears in Poetry, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal, and Narrative Magazine. Photo credit: Moon Duchin

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

We’re pleased to offer Amanda Gunn’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.