Today's poem is "Lower Lights"
by Alice Derry
from Hunger
MoonPath Press

About Alice Derry and Hunger

*********************About Alice Derry Page******************** ®

Alice Derry has an M.F.A. is from Goddard College (now Warren Wilson). She is Professor Emerita at Peninsula College, Port Angeles, where she directed the Foothills Writers Series for three decades. In 2013, she helped plan the 75th Raymond Carver Birthday Celebration and delivered its keynote address; in 2017, she was Peninsula College's 17th Writer in Residence. With colleague Kate Reavey, she has also facilitated writing workshops for area tribes. She lives and works on Washington's Olympic Peninsula.

Books by Alice Derry:

Other poems on the web by Alice Derry:
"The House"
Three poems
"Listening to Stone"

Alice Derry's Website.

About Hunger:

"Alice Derry's Hunger is a beautifully observed, broad-reaching, and ultimately political collection of poems--political in the best and necessary sense: she is a woman, and a citizen of the world, and searches out the complexities and indeterminacies of what that might mean. From a childhood understanding of the genocide of the Nez Perce, to an acute attention to the natural world, to the ways that different cultures maim their women, she is there, asking the hard questions. We don't get any easy answers. I greatly admire both the force of intellect and the aesthetic nuance that Derry brings to bear on her poems."
—Jane Mead

"Alice Derry's Hunger is so beautiful, so dense with layers of meaning and the weight of the unspoken, so rich in its language and rhythm, that the book as a whole just frankly left me breathless. These are poems of enraged tenderness, of estrangement, of questioning and seeking, poems of family and childhood, poems of loss and yearning and sustenance. I could hear in them, see in them, voices and shadows from my own life. I know I will be returning to this book again and again, peeling back the layers."
—Molly Gloss

"Alice Derry's poems lead us to 'heart's work' and the 'extravagance of our longing.' By honoring her own feelings, she helps us face them in ourselves. From the crucible of family life to the upheavals of history, we experience the deep bonds and betrayals that shape us. Derry's courage in speaking out, and her belief in the transformative power of art illuminate these pages. Poem after poem 'guards against indifference' to sing 'on the edge of a grieving world.' A book to read and celebrate."
—Charlotte Gould Warren