THE GENIUS OF HUNGER

In a food-laced first collection, poet and former Allegheny College professor Goodman paints a series of portraits of women battling for understanding in the face of an indifferent world.

All ten pieces, set in Miami Beach, offer a backdrop of grocery stores and service-industry reality. Joan, in the story of her name, frets over her weight even as she shops for treats that her rude teenaged son will eat. But her life takes a different direction, as, first, she wrenches her back bending over, then is knocked down by a fellow shopper, a handsome stranger who accompanies her in an ambulance to her uncertain future. Indian restaurant waitress Marcie, in “Shiva,” is so focused on trying to keep her sari from falling off her emaciated body and praying to the goddess for help in forgetting her hunger while reliving her battered childhood and history of failed employment, that she doesn’t even notice she’s about to be fired. Feistier Gina, a Costco cashier, has a battle of wills with a brutish, possibly pistol-packing customer, then berates the matronly woman next in line for having allowed the lout to cut in front of her. In “Dani,” when produce manager Brian obsesses over a shopper who went to breakfast with him a few times and then dropped him like a rotten tomato, the intensity level drops sharply. But in “Rosie,” about a trio of floral workers in the Winn-Dixie threatened by a new bimbo in the bakery, a wonderfully textured tale emerges. The three, two older women who’ve lost their husbands to young flesh and a scrappy girl with her eye on a stockworker in the store, unite in their distrust of Mandi and are aided one morning by a wondrous invasion of birds of all kinds, which reduces their rival to a puddle of mascara.

Compassion and a steady eye from a bold new voice that deserves to be heard from again.