Your Kiss is a River
Poems of Love, Food and Life
 by Carolyn Wells
ISBN 9-788182-500778  Hard ISBN 9-788182-500761 2016 pp.56

Carolyn Wells’s poetry evokes passion and takes in all the senses. Her stunning work entails virtual trips to Chianti country and the South of France, among other destinations, where she vividly describes the essence of place, nature, and exquisite foods. She finds subtlety in the most precious subjects.
Amy Barone, poet and author of Kamikaze Dance

Professional chef Carolyn Wells’s first collection of poems provides a shrewd and sensuous tasting menu of sweet, sour, and bracing servings from life. Spanning three decades and two continents, her poems use ingredients as diverse as childhood losses, youthful passions, Mediterranean languages, and adult decisions to create a deliciously tight, eclectic, and rich body of work. Now living in both Brooklyn, New York, and rural Pennsylvania, Ms. Wells infuses her work with a highly original celebration of nature and human passion.
Zev Shanken, poet and co-director, Thursdays Are For Poetry Center, Teaneck, New Jersey

With “garlic grown from my loins,” in a “tub of champagne grapes” on the “twisted streets of Toulon,” with “my tongue twisted in yours,” on the “back of a Vespa,” Carolyn Wells is a marvelous poet of food and fathers, sex and travel, all of the things worth writing and reading about.
Steve Zeitlin, Founder of City Lore in NYC

A master chef, Wells loads many of these delightful pieces with the joys of culinary experience as well as with other attractions for all the senses. Reading this book, one will learn a thing or two, but more importantly, one will learn to feel in whole new ways.
John Trause, author of Eye Candy for Andy and Inside Out, Upside Down, and Round and Round.

Carolyn Wells holds a B.A. in French Literature from New York University. In 1983, she moved to France to study French cooking, and remained there for three years, working as a chef on luxury hotel barges. Upon returning to New York, she continued her culinary career as restaurant chef, private chef, and caterer. Currently, she is Executive Chef Manager at St. Bernard’s School in New York.

As a child, Carolyn loved to write poems, and was influenced by her father, an attorney who wrote poetry, much of it love poems dedicated to her mother. Her childhood was spent on a farm in Pennsylvania. She and her sisters rode horses and took care of the sheep, cats, dogs and other pets. Nostalgia for the freedom of farm life is a subject in some of her poems, as is the loss of her mother who died when Carolyn was eleven.

In her poetry, she attempts to recapture childhood joys and losses, and to celebrate the beauty of an outdoor life. In her spare time, she revisits that era by going to her cabin in the woods of Northeastern Pennsylvania.

She is a member of brevitas, and has contributed to Alimentum Journal.