Publisher's Synopsis
Poetry. In THE HUNGER IN OUR EYES, Jared Demick presents poetry that traverses a rugged terrain of memory, history, agriculture, race, and culture to unearth narratives long or recently forgotten. The speakers in these poems listen intently with open ears; have tongues that have no hairs, and are witnesses ready to offer testimony to truths, desires, and thoughts that are often unspoken. Lines of verse stay with the reader with poignant poetic reality: 'But ghosts still stay, they hang in the air thicker than humidity.' A marvelous debut collection!--Sean Frederick Forbes
Jared Demick's THE HUNGER IN OUR EYES is a little bit country and a whole lot of cross-country(ies). The shape-shifting Americana here scores a playfully re-visionist choreography that brings into focus what imperial eyes typically miss: the accidents of landscape, the histories of food, the body's crossings. With extended meditations on cassava and honky- tonk (!), this book seeks out its own uneasy roots in a prickly and code- twitching vernacular, in an alternative We somewhere between solidarity and irony, between selfing the other and othering the self. (See Williams's In the American Grain: 'We are, too, the others.'). From Dust Bowl to diaspora and dance floor to truck stop, the re-making of Americans here is all about movement: all jittery lines and portmanteau puns (as in Oliverio Girondo's IN THE MOREMARROW) and a careening, class-conscious stridentity politics ('swallow these miniwage peeon blooze'). Still, this is a poetics limber enough to find meaning in strategic silences, in the 'awhereness' of 'our undelved / selves.' 'We're / osmotin' / peoples, ' sings the poet (a.k.a Demick); the rest is academic.--Urayoán Noel
Between mornas & blues, between masato & bathtub gin, THE HUNGER IN OUR EYES is a book of in- betweens that sets in motion an intercontinental vernacular, as funky as it is folksy & as ludic as it is informative, without resorting to any formula or formulating another ars poetica. Driven by historical, agricultural, musical, & gastronomical findings, Demick's poetry discovers & multiplies, it digests, reverberates, & recasts. The thematic breadth of this collection--from the tapioca/manioc/yuca permutations to the 'question everyone's hurting to ask, but don't want answered'--is deftly balanced by the poet's tonal agility, reminding us of the rare qualities poetry can have when it's written without a platform.--Joseph Mulligan
