Someone Else’s Hunger is a singular debut that immerses readers in one woman’s journey to thrive despite sexual violence, disordered eating, and the generational trauma of the colonial wound. Through a series of portraits and prayers, hymns and lyrical meditations, DeSendi dialogues with both the divine and the everyday joys of kinship to disrupt and dismantle patriarchy and its pervasive manifestations in the search for love, in the workplace, and even in our own familial lore. In her poem, “I dream of Havana,” she writes, “Once, you said you felt smaller / than the corner of my ribcage where we stow / the secrets of Santería. Dime, am I still pure,” reminding us how dialectics can drive the poetic line forward, unveiling realizations about memory, sensuality, faith, and grief. Across four sections that are both impressive in scope and brutally intimate, we’re reminded of how furious and liberating one’s sexuality can be and how self-love is at once jagged and nothing short of a miracle.
An award-winning bodybuilder, DeSendi’s writing examines the intersections between representations of feminine beauty, desire, and trauma and the entanglement between fitness and the practice of writing. We chatted on Zoom and discussed striking solidarity with mythological women, how poetic form can mirror the shapes and traumas of our bodies, surviving through storytelling, and the act of elegy as both loss and grace.
Isabella DeSendi is a Latina poet and educator whose work has been published in Poetry, The Adroit Journal, Poetry Northwest, and others. Her debut poetry collection, Someone Else’s Hunger, was published by Four Way Books this month. Her chapbook Through the New Body won the Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship and was published in 2020. Recently, she has been named a New Jersey Poetry Fellow, was included in the 2024 Best New Poets anthology, and has been named a finalist for the Ruth Lilly Fellowship and Rattle’s $15,000 Poetry Prize, among other awards. Isabella has attended Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop, the Storyknife Writers’ Residency in Alaska, and holds an MFA from Columbia University. She currently lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.
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Nathan Xavier Osorio: Hunger is a dynamic force in your debut. It brings the speaker closer to death and beauty, desire and violence, obliteration and wholeness. How did you imagine hunger as you wrote these poems?
Isabella DeSendi: It took me a long time to realize hunger was the true conceit of this book. When my chapbook, Through the New Body, came out in 2020, I thought the overarching container for the poems was desire—and maybe it was. But the more the poems evolved, the more desire just didn’t seem expansive enough. When I started organizing the manuscript, I realized hunger was what was truly at its core. Said another way, hunger was the kernel from which desire, love, and violence sprouted. For example, there’s the manifestation of a deep, visceral hunger I lived with, and which ruled me when I suffered from disordered eating. There’s the hunger of my family and my ancestors as Cuban refugees—a familiarity with scarcity that is deeply embedded in our roots, and also the desire for new life and the dream of satiation, which the promise of America provides. And finally, I think about the darker side of hunger—the void or wounds in all of us that can lead to hurt and violence. Maybe a better way of putting it is that hunger is an energy source, a potent swell, that drives desire. Once I realized that my obsession was with better understanding, or unknotting, the inextricable nature of these forces, it became easier to think about hunger as the thread that sewed these poems together.
NXO: Where does your understanding of starvation fit into this equation?
ID: If I look deep in my cauldron of wounds, I think I have the most shame about starvation and disordered eating. The question I kept asking myself while I starved was How dare I? My mother came to the U.S. from Cuba with nothing, and spent her entire adult life making sure I was happy and fulfilled and fed—and there I was, choosing to suffer despite her sacrifices. But that’s the thing with addiction, disease. I felt guilty and yet I could not stop. The poems about anorexia have been the most difficult to write and therefore the most necessary. When we were at Columbia, and I was still dealing with anorexia and bulimia, my poems mimicked my obsession with rigidity and order. The lines were tight and sparse and concise—everything I considered extraneous furiously revised away. My idea of music and the line was so concentrated. But as I sought help and moved out of that dark moment of my life, I started writing poems that were two pages, three pages, until eventually the lines would go all the way out to the margin, unwinding down the page. There I was, I was taking up so much space on the page, and the liberation of that fullness was intoxicating. It’s been interesting to think about the ways in which my relationship to hunger affects my physical body and the body of my poems—how much space I feel permitted to take up.
NXO: Someone Else’s Hunger might also be imagined as a weave of conversations between lovers, family, mythologies, and even with the reader. When in your process do your poems also become fragments of a conversation?
ID: I love the interrogative—it’s so punchy. When you ask a question in a poem (and it feels earned), you’re inviting the reader in, calling them out, forcing them to really think. The speaker of my poems is the version of myself I wish I was in everyday life. She is braver in asking hard questions, and she tries not to flinch, isn’t afraid of what her grief may reveal. The interrogative also opens the poem to others so that it’s not just about me, me, me. It’s a way to insist that this is a collective voice that exists beyond my singular experience. When I think about poetry as a kind of conversation, I realize I really love poetry that’s chatty. Katie Condon is one of my favorites. The work of Eugenia Leigh, especially her book, Bianca, also does this really well. Even some of the more recent poems by Marie Howe. When I read a poem in a conversational female voice that bleeds honesty, it feels like there’s no wall between myself and the speaker. It’s as if the poet isn’t pontificating, but having a conversation with me over the phone, sending me a voice memo. I was really attracted to this tonality while writing this book because it was the antithesis of how I’d learned to write a capital “P” poem. I was talking recently to the poet and my former teacher, Timothy Donnelly, and he said to me, “Remember when you used to write poems in forms with tight syllabic counts about rare birds?” Bizarre shit! It’s true. I was so committed to the poem as a formal artifact—but when I began breaking those notions, I realized that the chatty and invitational tone just felt more like me, how I would normally express my truth.
NXO: As part of these ongoing conversations, there’s also a gorgeous matrilineal thread that courses throughout these poems. Through the intimacy of dialogue, the poet-speaker invokes and thinks through mother, grandmother, the Virgin Mother Mary, and the mother country of Cuba. What do these matriarchal figures offer you in these poems?
ID: My fascination with the persona poem started during the MFA when I was trying to write about things that had been done to me, but that I didn’t have the cojones to write about yet. It was easier to look to mythology and to the stories of women in and around my life to find anecdotes that mimicked the truths or experiences I had also lived through. Entering their stories gave me a roadmap for the language I was looking for. It let me grapple with things I was trying to wrestle with without having to forfeit my privacy or comfort. As the book evolved, I was able to turn to these stories not just for comfort, but for empowerment. Their resilience gave me the courage to start speaking about my life. It amazed me, too, what kind of atrocities women have been surviving since the beginning of time, how connected we all are. Ultimately, the persona poems taught me how to put language to my wounds, and I was writing through them as a way to learn how to say the things that, for so many years, I could not say. This book is for many people, but at its core, it’s for women who have felt scared or silenced. I just hope they feel seen and empowered.
NXO: These figures appear beside feminine mythological figures like Persephone, Medusa, Athena, and Kali, which extend and celebrate an exclusively feminine pantheon. What opportunities did the mixing of these genealogies of powerful women generate?
ID: The feminine divine has always been important to me. In my teenage years, I experienced sexual assault, which disconnected me from femininity and wanting to have a body at all—especially one that would be desired. Instead, this trauma shackled me to shame and bodily abandonment. It took writing this book to reclaim that. Looking at the stories of these mythological female figures, most of whom had been abused by men and survived despite it all, taught me that sometimes the very wound you thought would kill you is often what becomes your superpower. Learning to own my feminine energy and and celebrate my womanly body ultimately became a way for me to come back to myself.
My abuela also appears as a sort of mythological figure because everything I’ve come to learn and know about her has come to me mostly through stories and family lore. In many ways, the women in my family are as divine as the women from mythology in that they have suffered similarly and survived audaciously despite. My abuela was responsible for bringing my mom and her siblings to America, and there are secret whispers amongst my family of her having experienced the same sexual violences as me. So, when I want to better understand myself, I look to my mom, to her mom, for stories that might reveal who we are and what we’re made of.
I’m also really obsessed with Eve and Medusa (like every poet on the planet—ha!). Eve is positioned to have to choose between being a good girl of God and giving into her physical desires for intimacy. That conundrum is something I struggled with as a young Latina growing up in a religious household. And then after going through what I went through, I had to figure out if sex was inherently bad, if desire was bad. If I felt those things, how could I be good? It took a long time for me to reckon with what it means to be a woman of God and a woman of the world—whatever those things might mean. That’s something I think about and constantly wrestle with in the book.
NXO: If hunger is one of the wounds at the center of this book, fury might be its antidote or the tool that the choir of women wields for survival. What about anger and its corresponding color, its redness, captures your poetic imagination?
ID: This book is red at its heart. Red is blood, violence, desire, love, fury. I’m obsessed with capturing anger and fury in poems because we’re so often taught that the poem is a lyrical space where only sophisticated emotions can exist. It’s hard to write an angry lyric poem and perhaps even harder to pitch those poems to the world, to convince someone to publish an angry poem by a woman. Can something angry be beautiful, crafted with precision despite anger being such a feral emotion? I think yes. In making these poems, it was important to me that the poems expressed their rage as honestly as they did their grief and sadness. After all, these emotions are inextricable. In the wake of my assault, there were seasons where I was sad and there were seasons where I was angry, often at the same time. Feeling both of these things simultaneously could be destabilizing, but something I realized while writing was that the spectrum of that emotional response is normal—so why not honor that in the book?
Also, in regards to leaning into writing through anger, June Jordan has this amazing poem called “Poem about My Rights.” That was the first poem I ever read that captured the energy I was looking for. All I really want is for future poets to know that their anger is valid and that it can be a source of creative energy. There’s no reason it doesn’t belong in poetry.
NXO: A key poetic form that returns in your collection is the elegy. Often, it’s men—both family and lovers—that are elegized. These laments are both sympathetic and tender but also careful critiques, if not of their subject, of their masculine worlds. Can you share with us what gravitates you to the elegiac as a method to critique, interrogate, or disrupt masculinity?
ID: The elegiac form gave me the capacity to both grieve and celebrate. I’ve loved and been loved by men, but I’ve also been hurt and abandoned by them. The elegy helped me honor this spectrum and often juxtapose those experiences. In this book I include an elegy for my cousin who killed himself when he came back from war. There’s another elegy for my tío, who was a flawed person, an absent father. But in critiquing him, there’s no way we can’t also critique America—the place that made him a man. There’s also an elegy for a boy I worshipped and adored simply because of how he played jazz—the feelings were not reciprocated as deeply. The elegy offers a space where I’m comfortable addressing the multifaceted emotions around loss and anger and men while also having grace for them, preserving what goodness was there.
NXO: By the end of reading Someone Else’s Hunger I realized that the collection was also a record of a body in the fraught pursuit for beauty. As you understand it, where is the body—your body—by the end of the book?
ID: That’s such an interesting question because my answer is always changing. Recently, I’ve become interested in understanding my relationship to fitness as a way to map my relationship to body and writing. For example, my poem “Ode to Weightlifting” is about what my body is and what she can never, will never, be. It has become important to me to accept the totality of that as I learn to love my body, flaws and all, wholly through every season.
I’m glad you brought up the fraught pursuit of beauty because I strangely used to be against people calling my poems beautiful. I’ll never forget that in my first year of my MFA, I was in a workshop with Richard Howard and someone said to me, “You’re just a pretty poet writing pretty poems.” That was triggering for me because I did not see myself as beautiful, and because there’s a warped assumption that if you’re a beautiful person pursuing beauty, you can’t have substance, that what you make and represent is superficial. We don’t allow women to be multitudinous, all these things at once. This comment felt like a backhanded negation of who I was as a thinker and as a scholar—but also, I felt harmed by the sentiment because beauty didn’t feel aligned with my identity. I was still living in a space where I didn’t even want to be seen. Now I can say this critique was crucial in how I learned to approach both anger and beauty on the page. I didn’t need to turn from it; I needed to double down. Learning to balance beauty with the brutal truth of living became a mission in my work.
It also took a long time to learn that beauty is not just about the way something looks, but how it makes you feel by looking at it. I don’t think I was trying to capture beauty so much as I was really trying to look at my body and feel worthy—I wanted to know my poems had value, that my life had value. And the pursuit of value, of worth, is one engine that drives the book. In this way, the poems are simply the byproduct of a reclamation and self-acceptance that eventually stood in the wake of so much violence, and reemerged despite. Beauty makes it easier to look at the world, knowing how much violence takes place here. The same can be said of my body. Learning to see the world as beautiful again was one of the gifts making this book gave me. I hope anyone reading it also finds the courage to look at their dark parts and see joy and hope again despite.
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