The More Extravagant Feast focuses on the trophic exchanges of a human body with the world via pregnancy, motherhood, and interconnection—the acts of making and sustaining other bodies from one’s own, and one’s own from the larger world. Leah Naomi Green writes from attentiveness to the vast availability and capacity of the weedy, fecund earth and from her own human place within more-than-human life, death, and birth. Lyrically and spiritually rich, striving toward honesty and understanding, The More Extravagant Feast is an extraordinary book of awareness of our dependency on ecological systems—seen and unseen.
When I come back in, she asks me to draw a picture
of her father on the hill. I pick her up—the miracle
of her lungs that grew inside me,
kept long dark—her working heart
let out into the rounder world,
the more extravagant feast.
—from “The More Extravagant Feast”