We are Starved
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
“Joshua Kryah is redefining what it means to write spiritual poetry. This is not another book about longings for the spiritual; this is a book of offerings to the spiritual. These poems answer the plea of Yeats’s spirits ('We are starved') and give them what they crave, depicting the particulars of human appetite and the way each 'peculiar and appalling hunger' unfolds. The scope of these poems is dizzying; they echo and glitter and sear as they, against all odds, give us a'world [that] is/suddener than any idea about the world.' We Are Starved is unabashed and unflinching, and it is deeply, exquisitely satisfying.”
-Mary Szybist, author of Granted
Mountain West Poetry Series
Published by the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Through the jagged couplets and one-line stanzas of Kryah's second collection of poems runs an unsettling but graceful drama of consumption and consolation. In an act of "cannibalization" of spiritually minded sources (Yeats, John Donne, St. Augustine, others) that is less a quest than it is the creation of a sustained state of existence, Kryah (Glean) opens up a space in which the reality of the body can be explored and made significant without sacrificing the metaphysical: "that darkness," he writes, "though the habitation of jackals, of wolves, of boys beating the bushes// to force you into the open, is ours." In this world, the vestiges of a personal history are indeed present, but the figure repeatedly bodied forth is hunger itself: a shape-shifting omnipresent entity that becomes metaphor first for desire but ultimately comes to signify love, poverty, family, home, community, and the foundations of any human identity. If on the one hand the book explores the contours of personal grief and guilt ("the frothing of those hounds I keep deep inside me"), while on the other it plumbs the depths of a general and universal condition of bodily and spiritual "starvation," registering and giving back the forms of "all of us moving in the shape of our own hunger."
