Joseph Lennon was born in Newport, Rhode Island, and grew up in Rochester, a small town in central Illinois. He has lived in Ireland and Italy and travelled throughout India. After a decade in New York City, teaching at Manhattan College, he now lives in Philadelphia with his family and is Director of Irish Studies at Villanova University. He has published poetry and critical essays on Irish literature and postcolonial studies. His book Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History (Syracuse UP, 2004) won the Donald J. Murphy Prize for Distinguished First Book from the American Conference for Irish Studies. Lennon spent many years living with undiagnosed coeliac disease and its effects.

Books by Joseph Lennon:

Other poems on the web by Joseph Lennon:
Two poems

About Fell Hunger:

"The poems in Joseph Lennon’s debut collection engage—in a deep, plainspoken, unfussed way—childhood memories (a street fight, a wild friend, an unidentified illness), offer samples of the quotidian, passing world (a woman at a bus stop, a bullet lodged in a tree, a painting by Vermeer), or celebrate the complicated reality that is family. Whether set in Ireland or America, India or Italy, the poems are alive with sharp-eyed, often elegiac, epiphanies in a universe of blessedly concrete facts, achieving, again and again, honest emotional lift-off."
—Eamon Grennan

"Joseph Lennon’s intimate poems investigate 'the borders that kept me from knowing / the place I am' and take the reader on a radical journey of discovery where 'poison grew like grass.' Illinois is conjured on a road in Ireland, and 'harmonies land as cupped berries.' His warm attention to the wider world around him is unflinching so the observed detail illuminates an internal state, where the body gives way to the spirit, and the line to music. These are poems of witness and illumination that urge us to 'listen for what is not heard.'"
—Catherine Phil MacCarthy

"The poems of Fell Hunger range warmly and ruefully across the scales of place and displacement—from the American heartland to the lost 'family country' of Ireland to Rapallo and Mumbai—and so doing manage to turn the genre of bildungsroman into a transnational narrative of longing and witness. This deftly assembled orchestration of sonnets and free-verse narratives offers the recognition that, while we may be 'from places we do not know,' such loss is also 'the seed of hunger.' Fell Hunger is an artful and urgent record of discovery and recovery."
—Daniel Tobin