Logan February | How to Cook a Ghost

How to Cook a Ghost

Logan February
ISBN: 978-0-9975805-3-2
29 pages

What Logan February has done in How To Cook A Ghost is taken food, a pleasure, and seasoned it with a visceral emotion that rings throughout this ode to love, loss and living through both in equal measure. I walk away from this marvelous work feeling as if I am full, and yet still hungry for whatever might come next.

— Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, author of The Crown Ain't Worth Much

With a meticulous tenderness, February has conjured up a collection of poems that explore love, loss, consumption, queerness, race & weaves them together in this glorious & haunted cookbook. The poems glow with longing & they smell like an old lover's favorite dish. You will be picking February's words out of your mouth, your pillow, your dinner, your heart, long after you read them.

— Melissa Lozada-Oliva, author of Peluda

"If you do not let it go, / it will burn your hands," February warns in How to Cook a Ghost, a stunning investigation into a world of grief, temptation, and loss. This set of instructions for how to live with the living ghosts that haunt us, most importantly, begs the reader to take a look inward, to ask of oneself, "Why do you fill yourself / with the very things that / will not stay inside of you." The wisdom buried in these poems is unearthed with each reading. And for this guidance, this exploration, I am grateful to Logan February.

— Eloisa Amezcua, author of From the Inside Quietly

Logan February's How to Cook a Ghost is an offering, hurried past you on a silver plate at the kind of banquet you attend only when it's dark and we are being honest. The poems tantalize with instruction, introspection, and invocation: "Retribution, like lemonade, is easy" promises one; "Turn up the heat. If your conscience / starts to act up, / throw it in the oven" another. A must for those who like their poetry potent, and who know that the best bites are meant to be shared.

— Sonya Vatomsky, author of Salt is for Curing

Sample poem from How to Cook a Ghost:

Marinade

Take this goose and soak it in palm wine Bring to a slow boil until it starts to fall a p a r t Butter is useful but it is a bad sign means you are weak have still not moved on The capacity to be underwhelmed is never more apparent than when you are calling the wrong name Hold head over steam try to breathe out make do with all of this homelessness The feathers are completely useless if you have nowhere to go Holding up your palms is equivalent to frying a bird over a candle when there is a bonfire raging outside