Ice Cream Poems: Reflections on Life with Ice Cream

Ice cream, ice cream, who wants ice cream? Hundreds of poets not only said a resounding "yes," but wrote about it. And from those hundreds, I accepted the 125 poems you will find here from 27 different states plus Australia, France, Iraq, Spain, and Tunisia. The poems are as various as the flavors of ice cream: long poems, short poems, and in addition to traditional free-verse narratives and lyrics: experimental poems, poems in forms such as sestinas, sapphics, sonnets, prose poems. When I accepted the job of editing, I wondered if I'd be bored by so many poems about ice cream; I wondered whether there would be hundreds of poems about The Good Humor Man or Dairy Queen. But I needn't have worried, I was never bored. The Good Humor Man and Dairy Queen poems were there, of course, but I was amazed by the wide variety of subjects: light humorous poems, sweet poems, lusty poems, dark poems, poems about childhood memories, a poem about Obama's first date, and a poem with Paul Newman in it. I am pleased with this final collection of ice cream poems. I think readers will enjoy them as much as I enjoyed reading and selecting them.
--Patricia Fargnoli, Editor, author of Hallowed (Tupelo Press, 2017)