In Kara Candito’s prize-winning debut collection a “garish/human theatre” comes to life against richly textured geographic and psychic landscapes. These poems are high-speed meditations on a world where Walter Benjamin meets the “glitzy chain-link of Chanel scarves” and Puccini’s Tosca meets the din of the Times Square subway station. Ferociously witty and intensely lyrical, Taste of Cherry speaks to us in a language that is simultaneously private and public, sensual and cerebral.

Kara Candito’s work has appeared in such journals as Gulf Coast, Blackbird, Prairie Schooner, Nimrod, Best New Poets 2007, and the Florida Review. She has been awarded scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference and the Florida State University College of Arts and Sciences Foundation. She has an MFA from the University of Maryland and is currently a PhD candidate and instructor at Florida State University.

“In Kara Candito’s remarkable first collection, we feel in the presence of a sure, authoritative voice, an intelligence and sensibility capable of registering the complexities of the sensual life.”—Stephen Dunn, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Different Hours

“These poems are poised and raw, hard-knuckled and siren-sweet. Their many speakers confess openly to a desire to be transformed, even undone, by unmitigated experience. Fearlessly and with clear-eyed candor, Candito sings a whole new set of constellations—made of ‘the body’s light . . . the din of a hundred conversations’—into bright being.”—Tracy K. Smith, author of Duende

“Just as wry, smartly provocative and interestingly disturbing as its title promises. With this book, Candito announces herself as a poetic voice born to our landscape fully formed, with intelligence and style to spare.”—Erin Belieu, author of Black Box

“The speaker of these poems wanders again and again ‘where the guidebook says DANGER,’ and even as the poet finds terror and pain in the lavish wreckage of twisted urges, a formal clarity, fueled by a profound hunger for life, keeps asserting itself in Taste of Cherry.”—Dean Young

Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry