Consider the Tongue is a cookbook and exercise in culinary poetics/Black experimentalism, by mouthfeel (S*an D. Henry-Smith and Imani Elizabeth Jackson). The book brings together recipes, photography, and poetry to meditate on and work through the history of pearl diving, oystering, slavery, and Black diasporic food histories as we’ve encountered with family and community, in dreams, by chance.
Communing is at the center of this book and practice—setting up a time and space for warmth, sharing, and openness. A time and space to hang out, to encourage deep, genuine engagement with our kin (our people here and gone, our nonhuman companions, our environments and their memories).
— Imani Elizabeth Jackson is a poet from Chicago working between text, performance, and food with attention to embodied ecologies, grief, and middle passage’s unfurlings. S*an D. Henry-Smith is an artist, writer, and cook working primarily in poetry, photography and performance, engaging Black experimentalisms and collaborative practices. As mouthfeel, the duo explore the entanglements of their mediums, ephemeral practices, and Black culinary traditions.