Poetry alum Isabella DeSendi '17 has published her debut full-length poetry collection, Someone Else’s Hunger, with Four Way Books. Written in the wake of a sexual assault, while grappling with feelings of dislocation in her own skin, Someone Else’s Hunger tackles the tensions between desire and appetite, ownership and sacrifice, and—drawing from DeSendi's own experience as a first-generation American of Cuban descent—assimilation and reclamation.
Centering the human obsession with bodies and beauty, DeSendi transposes questions of the somatic with the natural world taking on topics like violence, romance, eating disorders, structural racism, and socioeconomic inequality while seeking to recover through a quest for beauty.
"What is desire to the traumatized body? In Someone Else’s Hunger, Isabella DeSendi seeks to answer just that," says fellow poet Diannely Antigua. "Through self-portraits and sonnets, elegies and odes, we see the body as a site for both pleasure and trespass. At the core is always hunger—hunger for love, for invited touch, hunger for a self that feels whole. The speaker asks, 'If I have hunger, if I possess it / …isn’t that what this insatiable void is?' To survive is to accept the fragments left behind, the self caught in the border between past and present, English and Spanish, the US and Havana. DeSendi leaves no petals unplucked in this account of what it means to continue in a world full of destruction and joy."
Isabella DeSendi is a Latina poet and educator. Her work has been published in POETRY, The Adroit Journal, and Poetry Northwest. 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. 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.
Someone Else’s Hunger is available for purchase here.
