Aromatica Poetica is delighted to present the fourth in the Sillage series by Jehanne Dubrow. She is the author of several books of poetry and prose that dance with our heart’s senses, including Taste: A Book of Small Bites, which we highly recommend! Each of the 12 poems are written in the voice of a specific perfume—this one is Fille en Aiguilles[i]—and were begun during the height of the pandemic. For this Sillage series, the poems are paired with a …
Tag: French
“The Master of Scents” * Fiction * By Vincent Ravalec * Translated by Wendeline A. Hardenberg
He liked to think that wherever he happened to go, he got into people’s heads. He wormed his way inside them, influenced them, guided the moments he joined—that’s how he understood his purpose, his role here and there: as a joint venture—as surely as a ray of sunlight illuminates a day or the rain dampens your hair. Few knew him directly or had access to him, and yet many had encountered him. He was the Master of Scents. He ruled …
“Café Metafoor” * Fiction * Mike Lewis-Beck
I sat on a bar stool at the best beer pub in Leuven, not to say the best in all of Flanders, which means the best in Belgium, maybe the world. Of all the brews on offer at Café Metafoor, I chose the Affligem Dubbel, a dark malty ale, just sweet enough and strong enough, but not too strong. Like all true Belgian alehouses, no food was served, except for peanuts or chips, for the salt. I went for the …
“A Dictionary of Tomatoes” * Creative Nonfiction * Gabriella Brand
The summer language classes are free, but Rabka insists on leaving payments on my desk. Slippery eggplants—aubergines--waddled in a dish towel like purple babies. Ripe tomatoes cradled in a woven bag. Cookies, sweet and wheaty, pregnant with raisins. Moist, glistening farmer’s cheese, twisted like a rune. I try to return the towels and the tidy bags, carefully stitched from recycled nightgowns or a baby’s shirt, a towel from Canadian Tire. “This is a useful bag,” I say. “You should take …
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“The Fourth of October, T’en Souvient-il?” * Poetry * John Jack Jackie (Edward) Cooper
Amazing the ruin, the stupor of the misbegotten, fervor of memory may assuage: held long indoors, long drying and forgotten, a pinch of spruce confuses — a scent of miracles — overwhelming — brings to mind the sweetly fragrance — tiny, tart and sticky — pungent orange fruit of the Osage tree. I can see it, that tiny orange, feel it in my hand, clinging to my fingers, still perceive the faint glow it cast in my kitchen where it …
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Moby-Dick: An Ambergris Digression * Herman Melville * Excerpt
Although it is today considered one of the “great books,” Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale was not a success during his lifetime. On the contrary, it was a disappointment to his readers that fancied his earlier light-hearted (and largely fictional) travel adventure books set in the South Pacific. During the writing of Moby-Dick (1850-51), Melville met Nathaniel Hawthorne and took time away from his novel in progress to review the short-story collection Mosses From an Old Manse, which just …
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The Flask/Le Flacon: A Poem by Charles Baudelaire, Disreputable Man of Genius
In his 1919 introduction to The Poems and Prose Poems of Charles Baudelaire, which includes “The Flask,” James Huneker laments how in our modern era we attempt to rationalize the behavior of our dissolute favorites. Disheartened, he cries, “Spare us our dear, old-fashioned, disreputable men of genius!” But as he goes on to tell us, Charles Baudelaire has not been subjected to such unseemly resurrections. We have received intact the legend of Baudelaire: “the atrabilious, irritable poet, dandy, maniac, his …
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