Critic Reviews
Great
Based on 5 reviews on
The Southern Review of Books's "Best Southern Books of April 2021"
Punk-rock feminist poems exploring motherhood, pop culture, and resistance with a spirit of defiance, abundance, and irreverent joy
Kendra DeColo reaffirms the action of mothering as heroic, brutal, and hardcore. These poems interrogate patriarchal narratives about childbirth, postpartum healing, and motherhood through the lens of pop culture and the political zeitgeist. With references ranging from Courtney Love to Lana Del Rey to Richard Burton to Nicolas Cage, I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers from the World revitalizes the way we look at mothering: pushing its boundaries and reclaiming one's spirit of defiance, abundance, and irreverent joy.
Indie publisher of poetry & literature. Fostering appreciation of contemporary lit for 45 years. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award and more! 📚
Join BOA in extending a huge congrats to @KendraDeColo, whose newest collection I AM NOT TRYING TO HIDE MY HUNGERS FROM THE WORLD was selected as the Best New Poetry Collection in 2021 from @NashvilleScene!! Get a copy in print or audiobook format wherever they are sold! https://twitter.com/KendraDeColo/status/1448781170125283328
BGSU Professor. Loyola dad. BGSU dad. Co-founding editor of @riverriverbooks. Poet.
@hmvanderhart Can't rank a "top" five but here are five: * Traci Brimhall's COME THE SLUMBERLESS TO THE LAND OF NOD * Rebecca Hazelton's GLOSS * t'ai freedom ford's & MORE BLACK * Kendra DeColo's I AM NOT TRYING TO HIDE MY HUNGERS FROM THE WORLD Diana Khoi Nguyen's GHOST OF
"I have always loved Kendra DeColo's poems, so it's no surprise that I love this new book, I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers From the World. But I love it so much. DeColo somehow manages to write poems that are equal parts swagger and soft, equal parts holler and prayer. Poems that are irreverent and dead serious, playful and pained, built of precise and impeccable and raucous music. Poems wonderful and strange and luminous, as is everything when you look, when you feel, as hard, and beautifully, as DeColo does."
--Ross Gay, author of The Book of Delights: Essays
"The great magic of Kendra DeColo's poems has always felt, to me, like she knows something you also know, even if you don't know that you know it. Not just a movie, but a specific moment from a movie. A commercial you might not remember. Each of her poems reveals something about how one memory can become shared. Through joy, through terror, through rage. There is a generosity that flows through this book, not just in the intimate poems about giving life and then caring for a life, but also the poems that slowly, gently circle food courts, or open with off-brand granola bars. This book and these poems are a true testament to how intimacy and generosity can take as many forms as a writer needs you to see them in."
--Hanif Abdurraqib, author of A Fortune for Your Disaster
"This collection of glorious, powerful, dare I say iconic poems blew through me like strong weather. I felt electric, inspired and understood. Kendra DeColo writes about the body, motherhood and desire as sites for intense transformation, and having read them, I feel transformed."
--Michelle Tea, author of Against Memoir
"I find Kendra DeColo's poems almost unbelievably good. Shockingly good. So of the moment, so funny and yet so terrifyingly, intensely beautiful. I know most wouldn't find it at all unusual to have those things at once, so my response to them is perhaps more of a statement of my own positionality. Still, in a weird world turned upside down, poems like "I Would Like to Tell the President to Eat a Dick in a Non-Homophobic Way" and "I am thinking about the movie Con Air" feed me with their humor, whimsy, and pathos."
--Kazim Ali, author of The Oasis of Now