Mustard, Milk, and Gin
A remarkable debut collection about identical twin sisters and their parents' struggle with addiction
I am busy seeing, declares the reverent and ever-curious speaker of Mustard, Milk, and Gin. In this haunting debut, Megan Denton Ray unflinchingly sifts through the sediment of a girlhood ruled by service. Everything in these poems sweats--the sunflower working hard for its first pair of leaves, the sister feeding her twin like a father, the men and women working in a community ravaged by the opioid crisis. With tender restraint, Ray's poems question the infallibility of devoutness while finding solace in the classification of the natural world. What results is a powerhouse voice that chooses preservation above all else. No poppy, wild carrot, or honeycomb is too small a treasure as Ray weaves stories of loss and mercy through both dreamscapes and domestic scenes alike. The forgettable and forgotten ignite--these poems are gifts of curiosity and care. Mustard, Milk and Gin is the winner of the 2019 New Southern Voices Poetry Prize as selected by G.C. Waldrep.
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Mustard, Milk, & Gin belongs to the poetic genre of Southern feminist noir, running perhaps from Judy Jordan down through Carolyn Hembree and Melissa Range. What distinguishes Megan Ray's lyric gift is her eye for the perfect telling detail, "My grease" (after a shower) that "calls out I am, I am, I am, " or the claim (later in the same poem) that "Here, / God holds his candle to my candle, a leopard-print votive / with the fizz of a damp rocket." These are ecstatic poems, not poems that proceed from ecstatic experience, rather poems that conjure their own difficult, often violently flawed ecstasies through the power of language and voice. -G.C. Waldrep, author of Feast Gently and 2019 contest judge
The poems in Megan Denton Ray's gorgeous debut Mustard, Milk, & Gin bear witness to the natural and unnatural worlds with kind translucence: to swirling bees and begonias, to lost mothers and their jewelry, to the earth and the things we carefully take from it. It's almost impossible to hold the divine and the earthly in the same hand, but these poems do so, balancing the need to sing with the need to wonder inside of their lyric murmurations. All the while these delicate poems make a litany out of the world around us, bringing our hearts and ears into the terrestrial rustlings. --Adrian Matejka, author of Map to the Stars
Surviving "the splinters of [her] crib," the near-starvation of an "orphaned" girlhood marked by parental addiction, the speaker of these poems declares, "I'm hungry," and proceeds to feed herself, taking the biblical injunction to "taste and see" seriously. To read Megan Denton Ray's debut is to feast with all the senses; in her hands, memories--even painful ones--burst with metaphor, each poem lush with colors, sounds, flora, and flavors. Raw okra, lemon curd, milk, piles of plums, egg yolks, macaroni and cheese in jadeite bowls--the speaker looks upon her body's desires for these and other things and finds them good, asking, "Is my hunger not made by God?" Persisting past trauma into joy, Ray takes the world on her tongue and crafts a theology of resurrection from a shattered Eden. --Melissa Range, author of Scriptorium
