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Jill Denny notes:

A tidy Sunday grid with an eat theme. Er, rather, a neat theme. Ow, we're cooking with gas!

Drop-a-letter themes are common enough, so the burden is on the constructor to choose clever, colorful theme entries. ORMAN CONQUEST? A NOOK OF THE NORTH? Great stuff. OISE POLLUTION was the only outlier in my solve. Although it works visually, OISE is pronounced "wahz," like the first syllable of "lozenge", so the theme phrase clunked in my ear, like a tiny blip of noise pollution.

Other notables:

• Virginia APGAR was a pioneering obstetric anesthesiologist who created a quick system for assessing the affects of anesthesia on newborns. Newborns are assigned points based on five criteria: Appearance, Pulse, Grimace, Activity, and Respirations ... very convenient parameters, Dr. APGAR.
• CERES, the Roman goddess of the harvest, appropriately crosses with TESS, a dimunitive for Teresa, meaning 'to harvest or reap'. TESS also happens to be one of the most beautiful names in the world, according to an unbiased source.
• Another apt crossing: WESLEY and HYMNS, with O LORD hanging off to the side. John Wesley was known for his efforts in writing and anthologizing poetry and hymns, elevating their importance in worship services.
• Milton OBOTE makes far fewer crossword appearances than his successor in Uganda, Idi Amin.

– puzzle by Dan Schoenholz

Jill Denny notes:

First question: did you know the poem? I didn't. William Carlos Williams is familiar to me — his short story "The Girl With The Pimply Face" contains one of my favorite lines* — but I didn't know this poem.

Second question: does it matter? Not as much as I would have thought. Although familiarity would have made the solving experience easier (and the aha moment more crystalline), discovering the poem word by word was a charming process in its own right. Even if the puzzle contained a unknown poem from a unknown poet, I probably still would have enjoyed the puzzle. It's just fun to see a poem emerge from a grid, like happening upon a particularly beautiful garden during a walk.

I loved one of Jacob's previous puzzles for similar reasons. Crosswords as a vehicle for art, whether visual, musical, or literary — right up my alley. Jeremy Newton's "Ode to Joy" puzzle from 2011 was another beautiful example of this idea. Either I am reminded of something beautiful or I learn something new. Win-win.

*"Boy, she was tough and no kidding but I fell for her immediately. There was that hard, straight thing about her that in itself gives an impression of excellence."

– puzzle by Jacob Stulberg

Jill Denny notes:

It's unusual for me to print out a puzzle, but due to circumstances too boring to describe here, I ended up with a paper version of this grid. Surprisingly, that transformed it into something much livelier than the screen version. The puzzle is laughing at and/or with you!

YOU BETCHA was my breakthrough, a folksy phrase immortalized by Sarah Palin and Marge Gunderson. It was only after I completed the grid and counted up the HAngers-on that I realized Big Bert was not a WWI weapon. My apologies to BERTHA. I only know her as a golf club and a stalled megadrill.

– puzzle by Kameron Austin Collins