Top Highlights

• A sentinel of bodily hazards had materialized again.
• In Patell’s poem, as in this book, substances and environments set the terms of what can and cannot be absorbed to make life livable.
• However hyperbolic or representative, these contrapuntal narratives posit that through food, some bodies have reached their limits of absorbing a changing world.
• In this book, I consider how people make connections between food and urban life to explain that absorption is taking hold as the grounds for
• experiencing and making sense of chronic illness.