Achingly sad and incredibly beautiful, Karen Babine’s All the Wild Hungers is a welcoming invitation to dinner, family, and laughter, evoking a warm, full kitchen and good company ... Brief chapters read like poetry ... Every detail in All the Wild Hungers has meaning and weight or a connection to a memory, and Babine takes the scenic route to get there—speaking softly but with force on issues including money-hungry polluters, choosing to remain childless, and modern medicine. Snippets from intellectuals like Soren Kierkegaard and culinary touchstone Julia Childs are an entertaining addition. With emotion and details, colors, seasons, smells, traditions, history, love, and family are made to intertwine in All the Wild Hungers, whose pages impart pangs of sorrow and of hunger.
Life at its most priceless—not its dramatic, headline-making moments, but the quiet but potent joys of daily life, such as cooking new dishes in the family kitchen, doting on sweet nieces and nephews, and caring for an ailing parent—is the subject of Minnesota writer Karen Babine’s beautiful All the Wild Hungers ... Anyone who has experienced a family member’s struggle with cancer will be stabbed by recognition throughout this book ... There are some profound passages in this memoir ... Praise, sympathy and thanks to Babine, who has given us this ode, lament and meditation.
What I appreciate most about [All the Wild Hungers] is the ways [it explores] one of the most devastating aspects of cancer: cachexia, or wasting ... In addition to [its] honesty about wasting, another strength [this book] is [its] emotional range ... Babine exudes a passion that is inseparable from action, an inability to make sense of the conundrums of cancer ... All the Wild Hungers is composed, in both senses of the word, calm, and put together with care.
Written in 64 vignettes, readers may initially think the book will be an easy read. They would be wrong. The bursts of text allow Babine to take focused plunges into living with her mother’s cancer recovery, each time from a different poignant angle. Much like someone working through intense physical therapy to achieve a seemingly impossible task, Babine navigates muscles and nerves to craft moments into manageable bites layered with significance regarding the bones of the matter ... Nevertheless, Babine doesn’t hesitate to impress her hard truths amid nuance ... I recognize the anticipatory grief in Babine’s words and empathize with her desire to make meaning, stretch time, and cling to patterns, beliefs, and comfort derived from familial food culture. Ultimately, this devastatingly beautiful book asks readers to notice what we fail to consider daily and recognize what genuinely nourishes us [.]
Karen Babine’s essay collection All the Wild Hungers will make you hungry, startle you with beauty and break your heart ... Particularly endearing are the stories of aunthood Babine weaves into these pages as she creates new traditions with her niece and nephew ... On a craft level, the work is skillful and gorgeous in its simplicity. Babine’s pieces often have the feel of prose poetry, giving us lines we can almost feel and touch ... To read Babine’s essays is to walk a while with a family, get to know their roots, and come out nourished in every sense of the word.
Karen Babine writes the way she cooks: with a fierce and stubborn tenderness, with passion and precision, savoring each nuance and detail. She cooks, and writes, with the steadiness and strength of someone in full command of both her kitchen and her craft. In Babine’s second book, she has woven these threads together so deftly that it becomes difficult, and perhaps unnecessary, to tease them apart. Part meditation, part memoir, part philosophical assay, this collection explores the ways in which we try to nourish, heal, and keep each other whole ... Babine uses cooking, and cookware, as both metaphor and springboard, leaping from the material to the spiritual and back again with remarkable ease ... a far-ranging and thoughtful collection in which the author touch on topics as seemingly disparate as wild rice and the health of the environment, politics and the malleability of certain types of dough, somehow finding the thread that connects the literal to the abstract, the small to the mighty, the microcosm of her kitchen to the larger world ... This slender, densely packed collection is haunted, but never overpowered, by an acute anticipatory grief.
I began marking sections I wanted to return to, and it quickly became clear that I’d be marking the whole book ... brief, meditative, radiant passages that add up into a version of memoir ... Babine has a deft touch with language and the ability to convey complex feelings with clarity. She evokes depth of feeling without being dramatic. I wanted to read parts of the book to a loved one the way a kid wants to show a friend her skinned knee. Don’t touch where it hurts/but this is where it hurts. She is fully living her story, but also studying and analyzing it – recognizing its value, placing it in context. The writing combines Lia Purpura’s lyrical precision and the clear-eyed directness of Roxane Gay ... I admired the anti-velocity of the narrative, its attention to the small moment, its recognition that small moments are often big moments ... Babine’s story is not my story, but the pleasure (that is not the right word, but it will do) is her lucidity in the face of confusion and love in the face of fear. Her vast curiosity and intelligence have yielded a book of struggle, engagement and comfort ... Much of this book is about beauty and comfort, much of it is about the things that lend order, that anchor a life in the face of uncertainty (I offer a nod to Milkweed Editions and art director Mary Austin Speaker, who produced a beautiful book that is a pleasure to look at and to hold). Just as Babine uses her beloved cookware, the book itself grounds, as an artful object both within and on its surface ... n exhilarating comfort, in recognizing Babine’s engagement with the surreal time between diagnosis and what comes after diagnosis, and in savoring (that is the right word) the eloquence and care that has gone into sharing her story.
... unfolds expansively in small gestures ... With beauty, grace, and admirable humanity, this narrative marries human distraction, musings on the gloriously abstract, moments of panic ... There is a grounding focus here, a clear gaze in times of loss and uncertainty that fixes objects we can touch in time. These creations mark history, and spur other things we can create to place time in a world whorled with creation, spinning ever faster than we have the words for ... This book masterfully navigates the 'fundamental disharmony in the world', so it is felt 'between [the] bubbles bursting on the surface of a rolling boil' and the 'dead belly' of a mother that cannot eat in the wake of a chemo treatment.
... captures the disorientation we feel when faced with this most ordinary, yet extraordinary, of shocks: the mortality of those dearest to us ... [Babine] resists the temptation to simplify her experience into inspiring lessons, the 'What cancer taught me' tropes ... Babine’s essays reference Lutheran traditions and are imbued with a sense of the sacred. But in the same way Babine pushes against narrative structure, she also resists any particular spiritual framework or religious rhetoric. She wants to honor the spaces of unknowing.
This world of wonder is marked by a kind of magical realism, where skillets become family members and food becomes a language for navigating an unknown land ... With her stories and cookware and names, Babine somehow transcends the brute and ugly reality of cancer with a cosmology of hope ... When prepared with mindfulness, food becomes almost magical in All the Wild Hungers.
[Babine] continues to navigate her way through extraordinary challenges with ordinary comforts, finding poetry in the everyday. Reading this quiet book should provide the sort of balm for those in similar circumstances that writing it must have for the author.
The transportive and vivid descriptions of food in these vignettes (each one is only two to four pages) change with the seasons: she cooks purple cabbage and green apples in the fall as she reckons with her mother’s cancer diagnosis...while in spring, bright red rhubarb stalks emerge from the ground. Laced through the book, however, are academic-feeling musings on people’s relationship with food, which interrupt the narrative ... Nevertheless, Babine’s writing brims with tenderness—for her family, her home, and the food she prepares—warming readers’ hearts.
