A Fish to Feed All Hunger

In Sandra Alcosser's collection, A Fish to Feed All Hunger, nature follows the inevitable, and yet somehow beautiful, course towards rot and decay. These poems are peopled with souls who either embrace the beauty and mystery of this life cycle or vainly struggle against it. But always, life's decay takes on the colorful images of rust, lichen, brilliant fungi, peacock moths, and faded photographs. As she observes in her poem "He Didn't Speak," nature's colors don't fade with the passing of time as one might expect: "Images grown more brilliant each year/ as lichen do when they eat stone, dissolving/ the color within, breaking it to pieces."