Pamela lives near Victoria, BC, with her family and a menagerie of rescued horses, dogs, and cats. Her 2011 novel in verse, I’ll Be Watching, was a finalist for the BC Book Prize, the Geoffrey Bilson Historical Fiction Award, the Bolen Books Award and the Texas Institute of Letters Young Adult Fiction Award. Her free-verse novel, The Crazy Man, won the 2005 Governor General's Literary Award, the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Best Young Adult Book, the Canadian Library Association Book of the Year for Children Award, the Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction for Young People, the TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award, the Rocky Mountain Book Award, the Jane Addams Foundation Honor Prize, and was the book chosen to represent Canadian children’s literature at the 2008 International Board on Books for Young People annual conference. Pamela’s poetry has won the Vallum Magazine Poetry Award, the Prism International Poetry Prize, the Malahat Review, Exile, FreeFall, Arc, and Our Times awards, and was featured on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. She has authored fourteen collections of poetry, and her work shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Award, the Raymond Souster Award, and the CBC Canada Writes Poetry Prize.
Before immigrating to Canada, she was a Bread Loaf working scholar and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. PAMELA PORTER was born in Albuquerque, NM. Though it isn’t what I would call a “happy” poem, “Lent” defeats me into joy. But when does one ever manage to be as good as one could be? If one never does, then one loves and experiences love from within one’s imperfection, and, intolerably, wonderfully, one’s imperfection is entangled with the beauty of the world when the world is at its most beautiful, when love, even if it is only a sliver, even if it is only for a sliver of time, is harmless, and available, and felt. I love this poem because it itself seems to speak from the position of fallenness-not personal guilt, and also not necessarily fallenness in the Christian sense, but from the fallenness that is one’s awareness that one has not always lived in a way one would recommend to others, that one has not always managed to be as good as one could be the awareness is there in the speaker’s tone. I want to say clearly why I love this poem, but it’s hard. The poem floods the space, but does not overflow the space. As I read it, the poem floods that space in me I know will be flooded and overcome again next year, when Lent comes back around. And somehow the poem knows? The poem seems to know. But also Lent defeats me, of course it does. Reed, who publishes scholarly papers on genetic variation in obesity and taste in humans and mice, and examines the biology of human salt perception, was raised in a home that was built on a former asparagus farm, where asparagus spears would pop up in the middle of her family’s yard every spring.“Lent” defeats me-the poem, I mean. “Reviewers definitively told us that human food is over-sweetened.” The findings were published in the scientific journal Physiology & Behavior, and Reed was stunned to see how many online commenters felt “that normal, commercially available foods are often sweetened beyond the point where people want to eat them.” “Sweet was the most frequently mentioned taste quality,” she says. Still seeking out bitter flavors in adulthood for a different study, Reed analyzed 400,000 food reviews posted by Amazon customers on the company website over 10 years, finding that many reviewers described food products as too sweet. There could be receptors on the tongue for triglycerides-the main constituents of body fat in humans and other vertebrates, as well as vegetable fat-which produce fat’s oily feel. “My mom used to talk about a salad being ‘dry’ if it didn’t have a dressing.” Researchers now think fat might be a taste, like sugar or caffeine. For instance, many people think of fat as a texture that “makes things lubricated or wet, that you roll around in your mouth,” says Reed. Her team came to Twinsburg to study fat and how it is perceived as a taste. For a three-year study that began in 2016, she traveled there in a rental van, carrying a mix of fats: powdered milk mixed with milk fat, skim milk-and the crowd-pleaser, potato chips. So every August, she drives to Twinsburg, Ohio, for the annual gathering of twins. But every so often, they don’t-and that difference intrigues her. Most of the time, identical twins have the same taste and food preferences. She and other researchers aim to understand what’s inherited and what’s not in terms of smell, taste, food preferences and obesity. Today she is a behavioral geneticist who serves as associate director at Philadelphia’s Monell Chemical Senses Center.
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