I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers from the World

by Kendra DeColo

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781950774272
Publisher:	BOA Editions, Ltd.
Publication date:	04/20/2021
Series:	American Poets Continuum Series , #185
Pages:	104
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Kendra DeColo is the author of three poetry collections: I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers from the World (BOA Editions, 2021), My Dinner with Ron Jeremy (Third Man Books, 2016), and Thieves in the Afterlife (Saturnalia Books, 2014), selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the 2013 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. She is a recipient of a 2019 Poetry Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and has received awards and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Millay Colony, Split this Rock, and the Tennessee Arts Commission. Her poems and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, Tin House, Waxwing, Los Angeles Review, Bitch Magazine, VIDA, and elsewhere. She has taught creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and Vanderbilt University. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Read an Excerpt

There Is a Moment I Feel Free

driving to the taco place

where a few weeks back


a shooting happened

right where our car was parked


and in retrospect

it seems negligent


to have been that happy

sitting at the counter


squeezing limes

over everything


and Aretha

is now in my speakers


the song where she sings

in quick succession


“you’re all I need to get by . . .

baby you know that you got me”


and maybe motherhood

has made me soft


which is close to a kind

of ghoulishness


I don’t know

I know it has taken me


35 years to learn how to dress

appropriately for the weather


to apply moisturizer before bed

and sunscreen in the morning


to be this in love

with the life I’ve made


and care for it

no matter how reckless that is

Table of Contents

I Pump Milk like a Boss 13

I Write Poems About Motherhood 15

I Would Like to Tell the President to Eat a Dick in a Non-Homophobic Way 17

Love Poem in the Style of Jordan's Furniture 20

I Am Thinking About the Movie Con Air 22

Self-Portrait as Getting Drunk-Dialed by God 24

Weaning, I Listen to Tyler, the Creator 27

Weaning, I Listen to Paganini's Concerto No. 1 29

Why in Some Hospitals They Don't Let You Hold Hands During Labor 31

Love Letter with The Beatles, Lana Del Rey, and Julio Cortázar 35

How to Nurture Your Inner Life 40

Poem That Gives No Fucks 41

Ode to Vaginal Tearing Disguised as Fan Mail to Courtney Love 43

Ode to Slug Disguised as Letter to a Men's Rights Activist 45

On the Cusp of 36 I Remember the Only Republican at My College Gave Me Head and I Didn't Come 51

I Was 35 and Driving Route 40 When I Understood Why My Mother Escaped 54

I Hope Hillary Is Having Good Sex 55

Thinking About How I Never Say the Word Cum 57

"I Want to Burn the Frat House of America to the Ground" 59

Neruda, Maybe You Are the Reason Why 61

Seville 63

I Was in Love with a City 65

I Don't Like to Have Sex While I'm on My Period 69

I Don't Think Neruda Was Thinking of My Tampon 73

I Could Write a Poem About Electric Scooters 76

#Team Rat 79

Isn't 'Food Court' a Lovely Term 83

I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers from the World Anymore 86

There Is a Moment I Feel Free 88

Crow Flying Overhead with a Hole in Its Wing 90

Notes 93

Acknowledgments 94

About the Anchor 97

Colophon 104

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“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

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher