New Hunger

£5.00

Publication date 2020-05-01

What does she learn about the body?’

New Hunger weaves mythology and biology together through subtle poems that link our human bodies to the natural world in both celebration and anxiety as our familiar spaces shift dangerously around us.

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What Writers and Critics Think

  • Confident and bold poems, unafraid to tackle poetry’s big themes of nature or mythology, but always knowing to ground themselves in the body, or in an utterly precise and perfect image. Thrilling stuff!

    Andrew McMillan
  • New Hunger is a vivid and intimate collection, one which explores a nascent queerness, new love, and tenderly draws its finest inspirations from the bounty of the natural world.

    Mary Jean Chan
  • Ella Duffy’s ‘New Hunger’ is a gorgeous pamphlet, bright with transformation. Witness the metaphoric gift that predicts a fallen nestling will “shrink like a bar of soap / passed between hands”, or that describes the ill speaker’s breath as “a tannery”. These are also poems rife with physical transformation. The speaker turns into tree, night-jar, devil and salt. The post-operative human body is a roast dinner. The drunkard is translated into a song that we know, somehow, will be sublime. Duffy also undertakes a larger and much-needed translation of the world into kindness; if “loneliness is intimacy told backwards”, then these poems telegraph across the cold distances with empathy and love. Medusa is imagined sucking the stony fingers of her men; a selkie wife is given the kindness of return, with her pup, to the sea; and a lover’s plum stone is passed mouth to mouth in the rain-queered garden. Erotic, startling, grief-ridden but hopeful, you will find these poems “hooked […] under your heart”; this pamphlet offers a rich and rewarding imaginative world, and I cannot wait to read Ella Duffy’s first collection.

    Fiona Benson

Description

“Carefully crafted like precious jewels, these debut pamphlet poems are a delight … touching and rewarding. Brava!” – Kate Noakes, London Grip (read full review here)

“Combine[s] an impressive, technical ease with explorations of profound, personal narratives […]. Highly recommended.” – Orbis #194

“This is a startling first collection that has a constant thread, the body’s ability to retain memory, hurt, love, want, within its frame. Not an easy read but a must read.” – Artemis, Issue 25

 

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What does she learn about the body?’

New Hunger weaves mythology and biology together through subtle poems that link our human bodies to the natural world in both celebration and anxiety as our familiar spaces shift dangerously around us.

New Hunger includes ‘Ouroboros’, winner of the Live Canon Poetry Competition 2019, judged by Zaffar Kunial.

Ouroboros

Think of this as hibernation;
learning to last on the body’s
own larder of fat, like an adder,
overwintering; waking only
to shed the layers of skin
it no longer wants, or needs.
You begin to mistake hunger
for thirst, sate the ache
in your gut with citrus tea,
mugs of ice. The punnet
of grapes bruised by your bed:
a still life. Starving, you take
your feet, or tail, between
your teeth, then swallow.
Ouroboros, viper, faster,
feasting on muscle, bone,
you vanish into yourself;
a wraith now, wreath.

Ella Duffy is a London-based poet, originally from Manchester. Her work has appeared in Ambit, The Guardian Review, Pain, The Rialto and elsewhere. She was awarded third place in the 2019 Ambit Poetry Competition and was a runner-up in the 2018 Ginkgo Prize for Ecopoetry. Ella was a winner of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award in 2010.

Additional information

Weight 0.05 kg
Dimensions 21 × 14.8 × 2 cm
ISBN

978-1-912196-31-9

Pages

24

Publication Year

2020