The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: A Registry of Survival by Ann Tweedy

Happy New Year! This selection, chosen by guest editor Valyntina Grenier, is from A Registry of Survival by Ann Tweedy, released by Last Word Press in 2020.

Grocery List of Items Purchased with Food Stamps (ca. 1980)

Cabot Extra Sharp Cheddar  
Prince Spaghetti 
Ragu Sauce 
Steak-umm 
Bumblebee Tuna (four one-serving cans)  
Olive Oil 
Local Unpasteurized Whole Milk  
Tropicana Orange Juice 
Eggs 
Quaker Oatmeal

P.S.

My babysitter’s husband tells my mother it’s crazy to buy in such small quantities—it’s not cost-effective, for example, to buy one-serving cans of tuna. That’s all she can eat, she says. Later— in my teens and twenties—I start to feel the specific anger of others about welfare recipients’ buying brand name food and doing other wasteful things like subscribing to cable tv. The general anger has always been there, but now it feels more targeted and precise—the lists of things that are wrong with us. When I’m in college, Mitt Romney—running for governor in Massachusetts—proposes conditioning food subsidies on not purchasing cable. The belief that poor people don’t deserve autonomy: now a rallying call.

Ann Tweedy‘s first full-length book, The Body’s Alphabet, was published by Headmistress Press in 2016. It earned a Bisexual Book Award in Poetry and was also a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and for a Golden Crown Literary Society Award. Ann also has published three chapbooks, Beleaguered Oases (2nd ed. Seven Kitchens 2020), White Out (Green Fuse Poetic Arts 2013), and A Registry of Survival (Last Word 2020). Her poems have appeared in Rattle, Literary Mama, Clackamas Literary Review, Naugatuck River Review, and many other places, and she has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and three Best of the Net Awards. A law professor by day, Ann has devoted her career to serving Native Tribes. She currently teaches at University of South Dakota Knudson School of Law.

Valyntina Grenier is a multi-genre eco artist living with her wife in Tucson, AZ. She works with paint, ink, Neon, encaustic medium, recycled or repurposed materials and words. She is the author of Honeymoon Shoes and the chapbooks, Fever Dream/ Take Heart and In Our Now. You’ll find her work in, Beyond Queer Words, Genre: Urban Arts, Impermanent Earth, Lana Turner, The Journal, Querencia, and The Wardrobe. Find her at valyntinagrenier.com or Insta @valyntinagrenier.