Deonte Osayande

Recipe for the Poet Deonte Osayande

In Recipe for the Poet, Osayande coaxes us through memory, through the familiar, through the stuff that holds us together. A relationship, a life, as seen through the vista of a fiddle, the winding curve that is the process of love as seen through simple gestures and feel of roses, all of it the material stuff that is mixed, sifted, stirred, and baked in the warmth of the everyday. Here, we feel the poet's world through the rhythm of words, the revelation of memories. Here we breath in and back in shared beautiful lyric air.

-D. A. Lockhart, author Devil in the Woods (Brick Books, 2019) and Breaking Right (Porcupine's Quill, 2020)




Deonte Osayande emerges from the pandemic with a beautiful necessary recipe for survival in a time of reflection, loss and necessary healing. A delicate and powerful collection that kisses wounds while demanding justice for his community. These poems honor the natural order of life and death and questions all of it at once. A homage to authentic love and a humbling of a body, a moving forward of ancestor spirit. Heartfelt and wonderfully crafted, is the work of Deonte Osayande.

-Jessica Care Moore, Author of "We Want Our Bodies Back", Publisher at Moore Black Press