nobody understands [love] better than chefs.
To gather ingredients with care, to measure and hold and wash
and chop and heat and rest and season—this is care. This is love.
I first encountered Nikki Giovanni’s poetry as a middle schooler. My best friend—three years ahead of me—had read her work in English class, I think, and was obsessed. We’d been friends since I was seven years old—a sisterly kind of love—and I inherently trusted her opinion on everything, especially the arts. I loved anything Patti loved, even if I didn’t fully understand it.
But I know now that the most powerful art is absolutely about something more than “understanding” it. Giovanni’s poems made me feel something, both fulfilling and opening a hunger I hadn’t been aware of or was unable to confront or verbalize. Her poems were not about love; they were the essence of love, in all the ways I both understood while understanding how much I didn’t get it at all.
I understand now that Patti and I loved the idea of love. At the 2026 One Book, One New Orleans Kickoff event this past January, poet Skye Jackson reflected on her love of Nikki Giovanni’s poetry, which shaped her as a young poet, and how love drew her to the writing life. “I loved the idea of being in love. I wanted my heart to ache,” she shared, smiling. In this moment, she articulated my feelings for poetry, specifically how my young self felt when I encountered Giovanni’s poems.
“there can be no better loving than bread pudding.”
Or a shucked oyster. Or a jar of green salsa. Or a cup of tea.
Recently, my beau—a chef—gifted me his copy of Edna Lewis’s The Taste of Country Cooking, a book of recipes and stories about the community, family, friendship, and every other form of love. As I flipped through the pages, I landed on a recipe for fudge, which immediately conjured Giovanni’s poem “My House.” In the penultimate stanza, she writes, “i’ll make fudge and call it love”—a line that has stayed with me for decades. But why? I’ve never made fudge at home. But I have cooked many other things for people I’ve loved in so many different ways.
This revelation led me to scour my bookshelf for my copy of Love Poems, the little red book I’ve had since Patti put a copy in my hands as a pre-teen. Admittedly, I hadn’t looked at this book in a long time, and so I held it like an artifact, admiring the bold simplicity of its front cover, the angelic light and soft smile of Giovanni’s author photo on the back. The paper within just feels good, and the play of black and red text print is intentional and aesthetically pleasing.
What else is there? What else could we possibly do for our beloveds,
other than offer the foods they crave?
I ran my fingers down the table of contents, searching for “My House”—Section 1, Hope It’s Love, Page 31. Not far below it, closing out the section, is a poem dedicated to Edna Lewis: “The Only True Lovers Are Chefs or Happy Birthday, Edna Lewis.” Of course these two women who do not share a craft do indeed share an ethics of love.
I immediately sent a picture of this poem title to the chef, who has also been reading bell hooks, which had prompted me to pull my copy of All About Love off the shelf. hooks writes of a love ethic of care and affirmation. Commitment to such a love ethic has the power to change our lives by offering a different set of values to live by: the opposite of abuse and neglect. As Giovanni writes, nobody understands this better than chefs or cooks—anyone in a kitchen. To gather ingredients with care, to measure and hold and wash and chop and heat and rest and season—this is care. This is love.
Skye Jackson gets it, too. Her poem “grocery list for when my ex comes to visit” centers this ethic of care, describing everything she gathers to prepare for a beloved’s arrival, beginning with foods: “seltzers of all flavors / that green salsa he likes / avocados… …various meats (he’ll want steak).” What else is there? What else could we possibly do for our beloveds, other than offer the foods they crave?
In “My House,” Giovanni writes that people mistakenly “try to speak english / instead of trying to speak through it.” This makes it an unsuitable language for love, but in her Edna Lewis poem, she says that “there can be no better loving than bread pudding.” Or a shucked oyster. Or a jar of green salsa. Or a cup of tea. There are so many love languages, even within the language of food, but every offering of nourishment—even gifting a book, offering a poem, copying a recipe, or sharing a meme—is a way to say, “I love you.”
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Stacey Balkun is the author of Sweetbitter & co-editor of Fiolet & Wing. Her creative and critical work has appeared in Attached to the Living World, Best New Poets, Mississippi Review, and several other volumes. Stacey holds a PhD in Literature from the University of Mississippi, Oxford, where she was awarded the Holdich Scholar Award, and an MFA in Poetry from Fresno State. She has been granted fellowships and grants from the Modern Language Association, PEN America, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in support of her writing. Stacey lives in New Orleans, where she can often be found in the community garden or making puppets.