"In her new collection of poems, The Remaining Ingredients, Ellen Foos takes on the challenges, frustrations and, ultimately, joys of 'marrying and adopting / in one giant late-middle-age swoop.' And that's just the beginning of a wide-ranging perspective that she offers, with reflections on humanity's incongruities, death's inevitability, family roots and enduring ties, old friendships, and so much more. The poems are rendered masterfully with plain-spoken candor--some graced with a gentle but insistent social consciousness and others with a touch of soft-spoken humor. Having attained a lifetime of varied experience, Foos knows, 'It's okay to stir instead of shake / the remaining ingredients.'"

--James Keane, author of What Comes Next