paper • 120 pages • 17.95
ISBN: 978-1-961897-58-8
eISBN: 978-1-961897-59-5
September 2025 • Poetry

Someone Else’s Hunger

Isabella DeSendi

Received a Starred Review in Publishers Weekly

Dislocated in her own skin after a sexual assault, Isabella DeSendi wrestles with the thorny border between desire and appetite in her incandescent debut collection. Poised between her Cuban matrilineage and her first-generation adolescence in America, between assimilation and reclamation, between owning her own cravings and becoming a sacrifice to “someone else’s hunger,” these poems dissect our human obsession with beauty and the body. The poems in this collection use the lyric form to enact destruction and reparation as they attempt to reverse the vector of aesthetic power toward grace. Because Someone Else’s Hunger is beautiful, devastatingly so, it surveys violence, romance, eating disorders, structural racism, and socioeconomic inequality, all while yearning to still find beauty everywhere. At the nail salon, the speaker chooses red lacquer and the tech “paints the color of / anger or desire across the long lake of [her] nail”; in the city, where she feels like “an animal caught / in the sewer of [her] life” with “spring’s pink garbage / strewn into the streets while petals performed / their daily adagio down the avenue”; and behind her mother’s house, where she used to vomit at the lip of the reservoir, “where the water would congeal / then break like dough under [her] body’s simple rot.”

The expansive mercy of DeSendi’s breath-taking images is never more apparent than the moment they turn, as when she heralds the avian frenzy “in the moment right after a purge”: “always the miracle of birds arriving,” “a messy flurry…curious if any piece of me could be salvaged, was still good enough to be taken home to the other starlings to eat.” This speaker’s ability to see the tenacious tenderness that drives the scavenger, to recognize its creative intelligence for nourishment, belies the resuscitative artistry that never abandons her as she turns carrion into continuance, coming alive again. Someone Else’s Hunger subverts the revenge to recovery plot, arguing that the truest testament to the speaker’s inner strength is the resilience it took to survive. DeSendi formally moves between restraint and excess, illustrating the great courage required to relinquish the control she won back when she became the master of her suffering. But the reward of risking exposure, daring to open herself to the world and let herself feed off it? Abundance. The arrival of spring and “with it the audacious dirt,” this realization that “sometimes / in the breaking I am bettering / and in the bettering I am free.”

Poem for Anorexia in April

Here was the body. And here was
the body rippled with nothingness
I couldn’t rid. Like an animal caught
in the sewer of my life, I couldn’t stop picking
at my skin, simple soft waste. Spring’s pink garbage
strewn into the streets while petals performed
their daily adagio down the avenue.
I wanted to be like that: flat, punctured
with beauty even if it meant I would never
live again. Isn’t that what I love most
about flowers? Their difference from us, reemerging
despite death. Their splendor-
perennial sufferance. I’ll never forget
the shock of hibiscus: those big ripe heads
blooming diurnal against the dark edges
of the world. They know
what we don’t: our lives are but a single shot
of exuberance. Then loss
and at the end of loss, what we couldn’t unbury.
What carried us all the way.

About the Author

Prasie from Diannely Antigua

Praise from Eugenia Leigh

Praise from Ellen Bass

What is desire to the traumatized body? In Someone Else’s Hunger, Isabella DeSendi seeks to answer just that. Through self-portraits and sonnets, elegies and odes, we see the body as a site for both pleasure and trespass. At the core is always hunger—hunger for love, for invited touch, hunger for a self that feels whole. The speaker asks, “If I have hunger, if I possess it / …isn’t that what this insatiable void is?” To survive is to accept the fragments left behind, the self caught in the border between past and present, English and Spanish, the U.S. and Havana. DeSendi leaves no petals unplucked in this account of what it means to continue in a world full of destruction and joy. “That’s the problem with surviving again and again, as we have. Poppies will yawn / themselves awake, their bloodstained mouths. / One day you’ll have to live.”

Someone Else’s Hunger, Isabella DeSendi’s blazing debut, fiercely reclaims “the woman inside me / alchemizing, sanctified” as the poet locates her power in a deeply racist, misogynistic world where “even orchids look like lips / bruised and sewn together.” Unafraid to examine both the violences done to the self and the violences internalized, DeSendi’s scintillating poems flash and slice, but ultimately cut to repair and restore both the self and the reader lucky enough to take refuge in these remarkable pages.

“I can’t believe / what we do to each other,” declares the speaker in this urgent, urban collection rich with the music and imagery of New York City. With vivid, visceral detail, Isabella DeSendi explores the identity of a young Latina responding to inherited stereotypes and misogyny. The poet employs persona and ekphrasis to reimagine the mythos of patriarchy. From Mary to Eve, Eurydice to Medusa, and in a series of self-portraits, we see the female body: full of appetite but starving, full of desire but without consolation. Ultimately, this is an ode to self, to love, to survival—”sometimes / in the breaking I am bettering / and in the bettering I am free.”