Hunger

Alice Derrys Hunger is a beautifully observed broad-reaching and ultimately political collection of poems--political in the best and necessary sense: she is a woman and a citizen of the world and searches out the complexities and indeterminacies of what that might mean. From a childhood understanding of the genocide of the Nez Perce to an acute attention to the natural world to the ways that different cultures maim their women she is there asking the hard questions. We dont get any easy answers. I greatly admire both the force of intellect and the aesthetic nuance that Derry brings to bear on her poems. --Jane Mead author of World of Made and Unmade Alice Derrys Hunger is so beautiful so dense with layers of meaning and the weight of the unspoken so rich in its language and rhythm that the book as a whole just frankly left me breathless. These are poems of enraged tenderness of estrangement of questioning and seeking poems of family and childhood poems of loss and yearning and sustenance. I could hear in them see in them voices and shadows from my own life. I know I will be returning to this book again and again peeling back the layers. --Molly Gloss poet and award-winning author of The Jump-Off Creek Alice Derrys poems lead us to hearts work and the extravagance of our longing. By honoring her own feelings she helps us face them in ourselves. From the crucible of family life to the upheavals of history we experience the deep bonds and betrayals that shape us. Derrys courage in speaking out and her belief in the transformative power of art illuminate these pages. Poem after poem guards against indifference to sing on the edge of a grieving world. A book to read and celebrate. --Charlotte Gould Warren author of Dangerous BodiesAlice Derrys poetry is nourished not only by the celebrations and joys of life--travel to Greece a deep and abiding knowledge of world literature a poignant relationship with the natural world--but by the complexities of living within these very relationships. The continual presence of loss suffering injustice--that we as humans must face--carry these poems into their fullest realization. The unravel[ling] of expectation-- and of longing--as a kind of freedom is the heart of Hunger and its continual fulfillment. This is the freedom to be nourished sustained by our living itself. --Kate Reavey author of Too Small to Hold You