“Seasoned with a dash of [Su’s] meticulously crafted poetry and even a recipe, this collection celebrates words, culture, food, and the human act of making that binds them all together. A literary gourmand’s delight.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Su’s soulful reflections call attention to the complex connections between place, cuisine, literature, and taste, and revealing interviews with Su . . . open a window onto her creative process . . . This provides much to savor.”
—Publishers Weekly

“An engaging investigation of crafts, literary and culinary, that have been refined over decades . . . [A] collection that resonates with authenticity and wisdom."
—Booklist

“As an admirer of Adrienne Su’s poems, I couldn’t wait to read her debut essay collection. Sure enough, Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet contains everything I love about Su’s poems: warmhearted honesty, hyper-clear articulation, and a Frostian lump in the throat. Su tells us, 'cooking a meal, like writing a poem, is an act of making.' At their core such acts, she demonstrates, are the same. Her essays move organically from poetics to cookbooks, Maxine Kumin to Julia Child, sestinas to General Tso’s Chicken. Reading Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet is like having a great conversation with a brilliant poet-friend as they prepare a beautiful meal.”
—John Wall Barger, author of Smog Mother

“Adrienne Su’s Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet is a fragrant weave of essays, remembrances, interviews with writer-mentors, and poems (even a recipe or two). Complex nuances are rendered on the page as well as on the tongue (through all the senses, actually). Her Middle Kingdom is a home in the suburban south, where memories of frozen pizza, mac and cheese, and mashed potatoes share equal space with dumplings, Cantonese roast pork, and pickled vegetables. Here are thoughtful and generous tributes to the many kindred forms of creative making—for one thing, there is what the poet does with language and writing; for another, there is what daughter/mother/teacher stirs together and serves up at the table, for sustenance as well as insight and empowerment.”
—Luisa A. Igloria, author of Maps for Migrants and Ghosts

“The essays in Adrienne Su’s Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet illuminate the poet’s journey from the south of her childhood where ‘there was no language for addressing what made me different’ to Harvard University where she began to parse her relationship to Chinese culture, language, and food. They move through time (the first was written in 1996) and allow the reader a glimpse into the evolution of a major American poet. Along the way we learn about her sense of kinship with the poet Adrienne Rich, with whom she shares ‘poetry, feminism, motherhood, the quest for identity.’ Su discovers a passion for cooking and struggles with ‘the dim view that artists and intellectuals tend to take of cookbooks.' Su is honest and intellectually curious and willing to hold two opposing viewpoints at the same time. This volume is an important companion to her poems.”
—Faith Shearin, author of The Owl Question, Lost Language, and 2022 nonfiction winner of The Perkoff Prize

Praise for Adrienne Su's poetry:

“Chinese cuisine is not only about taste but also about creating a fully sensuous experience. In Su’s poems, textures and tang speak to all who crave bittersweet nostalgia.”
—Booklist (starred review) on Peach State

“An exquisitely textured book. . . . Peach State is so deliciously crafted through food that it makes me wonder why poetry is written about anything else.”
—The Millions on Peach State

"Su's approach is risky in its sheer honesty and fierce by way of simplicity."
—Ploughshares on Living Quarters

"Fans of accessible poets like Billy Collins, seeking poems for and about their own lives, are likely to find them here."
—Publishers Weekly on Living Quarters

Adrienne Su is the author of five books of poems, most recently Peach State, which was named a 2022 Book All Georgians Should Read. Her poems appear in many anthologies, including six volumes of The Best American Poetry. Among her awards are an NEA fellowship and residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Yaddo, and The Frost Place. An Atlanta native, she lives in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where she is professor of creative writing at Dickinson College.

Acknowledgements
Introduction

Essays
Codes of Conduct
Culinary Chauvinism
My Middle Kingdom
She, without Apology
Terse Wisdom, Casual, Not Lofty: Charles Wright at the University of Virginia
What’s in a Name
The Dog Coat
Where Are You Really From? Reading and Writing Place and Experience
People Were Upset That People Were Upset
The Way to the Heart Is through the Ear
The Risky, the Bold, the Audacious: A Remembrance of Lucie Brock-Broido, 1956-2018
Permission Not To Go 
Three short pieces on Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan:
Foreword to Vidya’s Tree
Saturday Morning: Remembering Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan
A Tribute to Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan
Review of Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry by Dorothy Wang
Art Is Long, Planets Short: The Lasting Power of Carol Ann Duffy’s “The Woman in the Moon”
The Pauses between Poems
Without Restaurants
Everything in Its Place
The Two Kinds of Poets
Two Dozen Reasons to Make Dinner
You Are What You Read
Between the Shopping Cart and the Chinese Restaurant
North and South
Invisible Cooks
The Divorced Kitchen
On Liking to Cook

Interviews
Poem: Substitutions
Lantern Review, with Wendy Chin-Tanner
New England Review, with Rick Barot
Best American Poetry blog, with Aspen Matis
Plume, with Mihaela Moscaliuc
The Adroit Journal, with Elizabeth Marie Bolaños
Woven Tale Press, with Sara London
Quartet Journal, with Wendy Ingersoll Perry
Poem: An Hour Later, You’re Hungry Again