Deanna Fong's first collection of poetry reads like a delicately prepared menu. Fong offers three courses -- From Skins to Bones, Exploration and Hearts -- each of which makes use of common linguistic, emotive and narrative ingredients.

From Skins to Bones opens with a poem called "Five Foods for Sexual Deviants." Here, Fong channels Lorna Crozier's The Garden Going On Without Us in an exploration of the sensual in food. She writes of Parmesan, that stone-faced cheese: "Pungent and potent, / this grainy unpasteurized patriarch / only yearns to be shaved." The poems in From Skins to Bones are thick with rhythm and description.