This fall, for the final Desk Book Club selection of the year, we’re reading Vibration Cooking: Or, the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl by Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor. It was originally published in 1970, and it is a hybrid memoir-cookbook where narrative seamlessly moves into recipe and back again. Smart-Grosvenor doesn’t measure; she cooks “by vibration.” 

For reasons of hybridity; authorship; intersectional approaches to gender, race, and cuisine; and its casual, conversational recipe style, it’s become a classic, reissued in multiple editions since it first came out over 50 years ago. A poem by Victor Hernandez Cruz (his Red Beans is a favorite collection of mine), “en la casa de verta,” ends the book: caribbean rice on the fire / with african beans warming / how / the centuries & centuries of sea exploration & mixing.”

Smart-Grosvenor had one of those incredible lives—one day she’s in Paris during the protests of 1968; the next, the Venice Biennale, criticizing the Italians for their racism (which we still hear quite a bit about today…). Reading this book always puts me back into my “Feminism and American Poetry” class in college, just the rule-breaking and genre-bending that was so crucial to truth-telling and consciousness-raising, the thrill of it—I love it for that reason. 

We’re going to have our book club meeting in October—the 21st or 28th, I am thinking, but I am open to your input—so I’ll hold off on more of my own thoughts until then. For now, I wanted to recommend some really good pieces that are either fully about or beautifully reference Vibration Cooking—PDFs attached below, as always (or for as long as my institutional access lasts…!)