A New Hunger

Laure-Anne Bosselaar

Beginning with a harrowing account of her childhood in a Belgian convent, where she was placed at the age of four, Laure-Anne Bosselaar shows us how the trauma of early emotional and physical deprivation can be survived by way of intelligence, humor, curiosity, and determination. Although many of her poems are overtly autobiographical, they go far beyond the personal.

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ISBN: 9781931337328

Format: Paperback

Friends,

this is the viscous heart I hide from you:
gnashing, polluted, hooked to my ribs
like a burr, stuck there and stinging,
and it’s only 4:14 in the morning.

Those sudden shudders my waking alarm,
then the daily discipline of shutting away that heart,
shambling through the house, touching things,
stroking their shapes as if it could help me

not be the Bad Sower’s daughter each morning:
the pit from a seed he sowed and left to parch,
and no crows would feed on it. So I lived. I don’t
want to explain this further, I’m done with it.

But this for you: on the days I hold your books,
read your letters, recall a gaze, the delicate
dangle of an earring, or the throwing
back of a head in laughter,

it’s you seeding the first beat into the heart
I open. And as the sun heaves daylight
into the parched tree by my window,
and rats burrow away, when pigeons come

down to feed on dust and pizza crusts, I thrum
the lit syllables of your names on my sill with all
ten fingers, typing them firmly into the brick,
and counting their beats, counting their beats.

About the Author

Laure-Anne Bosselaar is the author of The Hour Between Dog and Wolf and Small Gods of Grief, which won the 2001 Isabella Gardner Prize. She grew up in Belgium, where she worked in radio and television and became fluent in four languages. She moved to the United States in 1986. Bosselaar lives in New York City and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and the Pine Manor College low-residency MFA program.

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Reviews

“There’s a time in the life of a poet as a maker of poems, if she or he is going to become more than just good, when the voice of one’s second self fully emerges, distilling and orchestrating the poet’s concerns, while simultaneously infusing them with an inner melody—a music that reaches and satisfies both ear and mind. This is to say that Laure-Anne Bosselaar, with her wonderful third book, A New Hunger, has become more than just good. It’s an occasion to mark and to celebrate.” —Stephen Dunn