“It’s not a cookbook,” the poet Jim Franks said about his new book, “Existential Bread.”
To dispel any confusion, here’s what readers won’t find in its pages: photos of backlit loaves of bread or of disembodied hands measuring, dusting and kneading. There are no recipes. It’s about bread baking, but only insofar as bread baking is a metaphor for life.
“Bread making is instinctual, if you can learn to listen to that wonderful sense within us all that tells us how to make something else feel good,” Mr. Franks writes in the first chapter.
Meditations like these are formatted in stanzas with simple line drawings peppered throughout. Another twist is the book’s publisher: Drag City, an independent music label in Chicago. (In its three decades, the label has done only a couple dozen books.)
“As a format with waning popularity and profitability, it’s a natural fit for us,” wrote Dan Koretzky, one of the label’s founders, in an email.
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For many years, Mr. Franks, 37, lived as a wanderer, often hitchhiking from town to town and apprenticing at bakeries along the way. He worked early-morning shifts, night shifts, whatever was needed.
Mr. Franks has an affable boyish demeanor, an effective guise for his sometimes sober message — about food production, capitalism and how to care for one another. “The best thing, even bigger than bread, is that people just learn not to take things so seriously and that they can question things and not just accept the status quo, because little compromises are what’s ruining the world,” he said in an interview a few days before he spoke at a standing-room-only tour stop at Archestratus Books + Foods in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
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