'I met Fay Zwicky only once, at the 1996 conference of the American Association for Australian Literary Studies held in Arcata, CA. But this occasion turned out to be memorable for me and, in a different way, for her. I already knew her poetry; ‘Soup and Jelly’, a poem I had read a few years before, stuck in my head for its image of a once-vigorous man now in an old-age home, a once proud man reduced to accepting soup and jelly from ‘a dark-faced woman’, an image of white male privilege empathised with but also slightly rebuked.' (Introduction)