We are the Hunger

by Anita Barrows
The Aldrich Press
2018

An extraordinary collection. Truth telling, and truly pitched, resonant poems telling intimate and necessary stories set in the harshest landscapes of our times, with insight and compassion.

—Susan Griffin, author of A Chorus of Stones

The poems in Anita Barrows’ We Are the Hunger take us to a place Seamus Heaney speaks of—where the frontier of nightmare meets the frontier of language. Reading her is like passing through an energy field where you come out sheened from a language where horror and loss are transformed by the fire of imagination and the healing music of poetry. She is both a political poet of witness and a lyric poet of stunning luminous moments; when these merge, we have a kind of poetry that is so necessary for our time, a vision of the whole. If there is loss there is also hope: “not to remain so long in sorrow/that we neglect to dwell also/in gladness.” Throughout her work she keeps alive the idea of individual responsibility in an age of relativism. Her voice is strong and unequivocal. “Let the words of our mouths / be as flame / rising from ruined lands, flame / rising from flame, undiminished.” These are essential poems, poems you want to live with, poems that help you live.

—Joseph Stroud, author of Of This World

The opening poem of this book asks us to confront the fire of Dante’s Purgatory – on the other side of which is Beatrice, his heart’s desire. We Are the Hunger is haunted by beauty and dissolution, by the natural world and the cries of birds and insects, by the human world and its song of destruction. Graves everywhere, “always / wars going on,” but also “cornstalks swaying in the last hot wind of August.” And the fire of hope.

—Alicia Ostriker, author of The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog.