Tender Buttons (1914) is Gertrude Stein's collection of experimental prose poems in three sections: Objects, Food, Rooms. It turns ordinary things into playful, abstract language through repetition, rhythm, and shifting meaning. It rewards listeners open to sound and ambiguity rather than conventional narrative.
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Text source: gutenberg.org · The work is in the public domain.
Opening of the book
TENDER BUTTONS Objects · Food · Rooms Gertrude Stein 1914 CONTENTS OBJECTS FOOD ROOMS OBJECTS A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS. A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading. GLAZED GLITTER. Nickel, what is nickel, it is originally rid of a cover. The change in that is that red weakens an hour. The change has come. There is no search. But there is, there is that hope and that interpretation and sometime, surely any is unwelcome, sometime there is breath and there will be a
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