Being an avid baker myself, I thought I had a decent rolodex of recipes to my name. Kate Lebo puts me to shame; by the second page I learned about such delicacies as avocado pie, black bottom pie, chess pie, Guinness pie, hoosier pie, and mumbleberry pie. Never heard of some of these? Me neither. My morning reading of  ACBOP incited an afternoon of Googleing, note-taking and calling up of friends to say, “hey, we’re making mumbleberry pie tomorrow”.

Lebo’s work also includes a fascinating section of prose poems, some of which give the interesting, little known history behind certain pies. Others focus on the applications of pie-preference to personality, and the rest are simply beautiful. The poems on mincemeat pie and strawberry rhubarb pie are particularly noteworthy.

In the back of the zine are four recipes: two different pie crusts, an apple pie and a cherry rhubarb pie. As soon as the necessary ingredients can be assembled, I intend to get baking.
Kate Lebo has plans to expand “A Commonplace Book of Pie” into a much larger piece. She says of her work: “I think of ACBOP as a zine right now, though I’m working on a book-length manuscript. The current, letterpressed version has 10 prose poems and three recipes. The full-length version will have at least 30 poems and matching illustrative recipes. I tell the story of ACBOP’s birth right here, on my blog, Good Egg.”