Rachel Rodman's collection of odd literary recipes that blend horror, folk tales and humor in wonderfully quirky poetry. Exotic Meats & Inedible Objects is grim and playful, by turns; its pieces have been variously described as "clever and funny," "disturbing and thought-provoking," and "amusing and weird."

You Couldn't Cook It Less

?figs, diced ?rat's anus, saut? Stir with a bow from the world's smallest violin. Add some other stuff, too-or not. Whatever.

America the Beautiful

?bald eagle ?big blue ox ? amber waves of grain Encase in an apple pie crust. Frost with smallpox.

Recipes of this "classic" form are interspersed with works of very short prose, which give a culinary spin to famous stories.

Mid-Diluvian Meatballs

As the water receded from the land, revealing an empty world, Noah descended from the Ark. His stomach bulged, and the deck behind him was littered with bones and gristle. "You misunderstood," said a Voice from the clouds. It was raw and enraged and tragic, and it reverberated with the irrevocability of the loss. "Those animals were not for eating."

Exotic Meats & Inedible Objects explores many subjects: history, time travel, and ancient myths; art, biology, popular culture, fairy tales, and mathematics. It is funny. It is sad. It is strange and playful and provocative.

What really drives Exotic Meats & Inedible Objects though, is the idiosyncratic conviction that everything is edible. (And, in its own way: delicious.) And that even traditionally inert ingredients, like fallen trees, jars of urine, semicolons, sound waves, nihilism, and so on, can, and should, be chopped, seasoned, baked, frosted, swallowed, digested…

and savored.