Culinary Poetics and Feminist Voice

Poetry by women, especially about food, often moves beyond the actual act of support to disclose on the richer tales of care, loss, identity, and survival. This study elucidates how women poets use culinary imagery and home rituals as therapeutic expressions of emotional resilience and happening. Through a literal reading of Kamala Das, Meena Alexander, and Arundhathi Subramaniam’s poems, the research examines how cooking, tasting, and feeding are the ways through which matrilineal knowledge is rescued, mounting loss is addressed, and broken selves are stocked. This article examines how food-themed writing functions as a mode of incarnated authorship within the textual matter of poetic therapy, narrative healing, and feminist literary theory. Culinary poetics enable women poets to refigure attributes that are long mapped with gendered silence and labor as places of poetic resistance, self-restoration, and healing emotion. The kitchen is not patterned as confinement within its walls but as the space of poetic resistance and self-healing.