Too frequently commercial success comes to poets of little ability. Such is not the case with Jong. In deft verse she addresses life's difficulties with ever-increasing maturity. As a poet of substance, she speaks to the human condition.
Poetry magazine and the Poetry Society of America have praised her verse with awards, and she also received the Borestone Mountain Award.
Jong's first book, Fruits & Vegetables (1971), contains five sections, and while each has a distinct theme, the collective title unifies them. The poems in the first section, "Fruits & Vegetables," are numbered rather than titled in order to suggest the infinite possibilities--both culinary and metaphorical--of vegetable life. The poet finds most meaning in the simple onion. She quotes Julia Child ("It is hard to imagine a civilization without onions"), writes a one-line poem about it ("O note the two round holes in the onion"), and muses on it in number 5, a single prose paragraph. Child establishes the onion's universality, the poem focuses on its orthography and shape to suggest sexuality and eternity, and the prose examines its human characteristics. Jong observes its "pinkish brown" skin; its odor, which is "almost animal"; its "capacity for self-scrutiny," which comes from peeling away layers of skin only to find more skin at the core.
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