Another Word for Hunger
by Heather Bartlett
Sundress Publications
Another Word for Hunger is a spare, honest, and tender debut that nimbly contemplates the complications of love, mother/daughter relationships, loneliness, religion, sex, misogyny, queerness, and gender. At its essence, this collection is about desire and love, and the ways the two intersect—and don’t. Short poems with short lines that cut with their sharp precision, this collection begins in adulthood and intimacy before journeying back to a time when notions of heteronormativity are challenged and examined. Here is a spectrum of formative experience: ‘someday I will learn / what it means to want more / woman she says …’
Another Word for Hunger imagines new and more inclusive spiritual practices, as when two lovers confess their sins to each other. Here there is fire, burning, hunger, thirst, biting, craving, and wanting as a deep sense of yearning looms. Here there is yearning for love, yes, but also for acceptance, for comfort, for understanding, and for a better world. It can be quelled at times, even seemingly quenched, but inevitably yearning returns as something painfully beautiful.
“The poems in Heather Bartlett’s Another Word for Hunger, their movements confident and precise, explore the intricacies of desire, memory, and perspective—and the ways language can both fail us and save us. What an exciting debut collection!”
—Maggie Smith, author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful
“Heather Bartlett’s Another Word for Hunger is a marvelous, haunting conundrum, a book of poems simultaneously revelatory and elusive; a dialogue and soliloquy of what can be said and what cannot. Bartlett’s story of two lovers charts the inchoate territory of where both the forbidden and possible meet in our lives. Another Word for Hunger is a consoling, stunning gift.”
—Jan Heller Levi, author of That’s the Way to Travel
“Erotically charged and lyrically compressed, the poems in Heather Bartlett’s moving debut collection, Another Word for Hunger, sing and seduce, tease and confess, forgive and interrogate, as they explore the dangers and hungers of desire, the exquisite pleasures of its fulfillment, and dare to use the word ‘love.’”
—Donna Masini, author of 4:30 Movie
“Heather Bartlett’s Another Word for Hunger is a tender first book exploring the atmosphere of love, intimacy, and community. These striking poems function as a meditation on the body and celebrate transformation in the quiet moments, the everyday. A lovely debut. ”
—francine j. harris, author of Here Is the Sweet Hand
More reviews: Los Angeles Review
Heather Bartlett 