Eating Mythos Soup
 Kim Pearson
 (Reviewed by The Editor - Rebecca Brown)
 2000 Fithian Press
  ISBN: 1564743195


Poemstories for Laura, a being to whom all people tell their stories. She is a shape-shifter, an angel, a guide & her role is to eat the stories people give her.

The stories in Eating Mythos Soup are wild & exotic, still & brilliant, daydreams & nightmares & Laura devours them all.

“Laura has discovered the way to peace and waits for you to join her. She spreads her flowers and leaves on the path and sits by the sea waiting quietly for you to come, which you will. She sniffs the air, delicate as a deer, and snuffs huh, huh with recognition as she smells you. She smiles and her teeth glisten like small round pearls, dripping with Greek wine and flowers. Her breath smells of wine and acid. Like the breezes from the Aegean it tells you of life and decay.” The 52 poemstories, sizzling with imagery & metaphor, are alive with the joy of language. They come from all sorts of people, a gardener, a purple witch, an accountant, a clown & they are filled with hope, sex, guilt, dung, fear & love.

Earthy & intensely spiritual at the same time, Eating Mythos Soup is not a book to be gobbled at one sitting. It is a feast of sumptuous stories to return to, again & again, becoming entranced with Laura's attributes & then the thrill of the stories.

From The Story of a Purple Witch: ”Porphyria dreamed purple dreams all her life, but no one knew this until the end, not even her. Until she was fifty, her life was a medium shade of gray. I knew her; I sold her oranges and limes from time to time. Never a drop of purple fell from her skin to tell me what color she really was.”

I met Kim Pearson at the Seattle October BookFest & she gladly offered me a signed copy of Eating Mythos Soup when I could not get my eyes out of it, even as she was speaking to me! It could have as easily been catalogued in the Religious & Spiritual or Literature & Fiction genres as in Women's Books -- except that Eating Mythos Soup is an immersion, like a mikvah, in the feminine.

This is a book I would give to every one of my women friends because the stories are richly lyrical & evocative, & the language spellbinding!

Kim Pearson's writing skills earn her keep by helping others to write their memoirs. Visit www.primary-sources.com. She gave me a super Interview too!
(04/07/02)

Rebecca