Xu Smith appeared in Issue 30 with two poems, Bread and Dollar Chinese. Both begin with ordinary acts of eating and smelling, then use those sensory details to expose memory, embarrassment, appetite, and the social meanings attached to food.
Xu Smith in the historical archive
The Issue 30 pair is compact and materially alert. Food is never background decoration: it carries time, class, bodily process, social judgment, and the uneasy relation between private appetite and public appearance.
Bread
Bread compresses a meal, digestion, memory, and mortality into a short meditation. Yesterday’s food becomes part of a cycle in which consumption and decomposition share the same imaginative space, giving the poem a darkly comic sense of time moving through the body.
Dollar Chinese
Dollar Chinese moves into a Chelsea gallery, where the smell of cooked food collides with an environment defined by restraint and whiteness. The poem follows the social charge of smell: what is eaten privately becomes legible in public, and sensory recognition carries an immediate burden of shame and judgment.
Food, memory, and social space
Together the poems turn food into a way of reading bodies and rooms. One looks inward toward digestion and time; the other looks outward toward manners, taste, and social exposure. Their shared attention to physical detail gives Xu Smith’s Issue 30 contribution a distinctive coherence.