New poetry collection!
Two rivers course through Ruth Goring’s poems: a cold river of hunger, a shimmering river of joy. The reader rides these deep waters with the poet, encountering a world whose hunger carries holiness. On a city bus, recorded announcements become a liturgy; the poet walks in snowfall and hears spirits whispering from the ground; late-night jazz improvisation transmutes to ecstatic church. Goring is a world citizen, attentive to hunger for justice among families of the disappeared in Colombia, doctors in Syria, West Bank teenagers. The English language with all its riches is insufficient for this hunger, and so Spanish tumbles onto the page from time to time, sometimes in entire poems with elegant translations.
The Authority of Hunger opens up a ravine of vulnerability, “the murk / born in me,” trusting the reader as a companion and fellow pilgrim. We enter an intimacy both public and private: love, neocolonialism, racism, personal violations, loneliness, unbearable family stories, forgiveness, mending. In this “physical humidity of thought,” Goring’s words become garments for our own grief, bread to assuage our hunger.
It brings me great joy to see The Authority of Hunger launched into the world! To see the endorsements, go to the Books tab. You can purchase from the publisher here, from the online Bookshop here, or order from your favorite local bookstore. I’m available for readings and chats about being an activist and poet in these fraught times—use the Contact tab if you’d like to invite me. I’m so grateful to Eric Muhr, my kind, thoughtful editor at Fernwood Press.
The cover image is my own (painstaking!) digital painting of a venerable century plant.
“Poetry and beauty are always making peace. When you read something beautiful you find coexistence; it breaks walls down.”—Mahmoud Darwish
