Interview with Isabella DeSendi on Someone Else’s Hunger (Four Way Books, 2025)

Re:Viewed by Hannah Bonner

RE:VIEW

Isabella DeSendi, whose poetry appears in our seventh issue On the Brink of Relief, is a stunning, urgent voice in the field of contemporary poetry. Her debut book Someone Else’s Hunger explores sexual violence, femininity, mythology, family, and race with lyrical prowess and narrative propulsion. In the book’s opening poem “Once, While Disembowling the Chicken,” DeSendi writes, “At home, in school, in America, razors slept / in our socks like small slick moons, and hydrangeas / bloomed despite the heat while I became a woman.” The unexpected pairing of “razors” and “small slick moons” evokes the writing of confessional poets like Anne Sexton who manage to marry beauty and violence with dazzling aplomb. I sat down to chat with DeSendi days before her book launch in Brooklyn.  

Hannah: As I was rereading this collection, I noted that certain images we typically associate with classical beauty carry connotations of violence, especially light and flowers. You write, “the knife was light” or “flowers falling quiet as knives.” Part of the book’s narrative thread seems about subverting or redefining beauty—what was your approach to depicting beauty in the book?

Isabella: As a woman in the world, a brown woman in the world, a woman who’s been through an array of violent experiences, I feel like a lot of my life has been spent learning how to see myself as beautiful. I think of this anecdote when I was in my MFA—someone said to me, “you’re just a pretty poet writing pretty poems.” I remember being really frustrated by that comment because I didn’t even identify, at that time, as a “pretty person.” And what is a “pretty poem”? Is it classical? Lyrical? That comment was the catalyst I needed to push my work toward the edge of violence and rage, and the combination of both destruction and creation was where I really felt like I found my voice. As a writer, I had to go to both extremes to find how those two extremes clash and collide and are, ultimately, inextricable– but can alchemize, and hopefully make something honest in their tangling. After all, the world is both beautiful and violent, and hopefully the poems are witnesses of it all.  

H: I see these themes of beauty and destruction, especially in your poem “Pep Talk for Medusa.” I was struck by the presence of figures like Medusa, Persephone, Mary, Eurydice, etc. in the book, and I was curious how you were thinking about these archetypal women from mythology. How do these women add an additional narrative texture to the book?

I: I think when I was first writing these poems, I knew the kind of poem I wanted to write, but I was not yet the woman I needed to be to write those poems. One way I found myself getting into the work I wanted to do was by submerging myself in the stories of these women. I found companionship in their experiences. Since the beginning of time, women have been experiencing the same violence and injustices. Some of these poems are persona poems, some are odes, but honoring the voices and stories of these women allowed me to write what I needed to write without inserting the “I” into the poem. Finding commonalities within this community of women gave me courage as both a person and a writer. 

For example, the Medusa poem allowed me to understand my own feeling of otherness. Medusa is a woman who was once so beautiful and was taken by a god, raped, and then punished by another woman for being defiled against her will. For the rest of her life she had to live as a monster without being truly seen. 

As a person who had been assaulted, who felt like a woman whose innocence had been taken, the consequence of that experience felt, for a long time, like a kind of misknowing or mis-seeing from others. Medusa allowed me to look at my truth more clearly without my wound being the spotlight of that poem. I had to whisper before I learned to sing. 

H: Several months ago you posted to your Instagram stories, “It feels like this expectation of transparency [for writers] is disproportionately imposed on women and marginalized people (maybe because there is an implied expectation of woundedness?). As someone who pushes to write candidly, I also want to remind artists that we don’t have to. Marie Howe recently told me that having healthy boundaries with our audience is necessary, despite wanting to feel connected. It is a privilege to see someone fully—not a right or condition for worth in art.” As a woman writer, as a confessional poet, this resonated with me so much. How have you been thinking about maintaining that boundary for yourself in anticipation of the publication of Someone Else’s Hunger?

I: I think Marie Howe really saved me on this one! I recall this one time she came to speak at Columbia University. Someone asked her about a kind of abuse that appears in her book. She turned to them and she said, “Do I call it abuse? Did I say that?” When the person conceded she  hadn’t, she replied, “Then let’s not make assumptions about my experience.” She’s a perfect example of how writers must set—and maintain—their own boundaries. 

My book is barely in the world, so my boundaries may shift and change, but there was no hiding what this book was about. I want to make sure it reaches the people I want it to reach: people who connect to these stories. I want to maintain an openness with those readers, but I also feel really protective of not retraumatizing myself and not talking about subject matter in front of strangers if it does not serve the work. 

Getting permission from Marie to tell people to fuck off was really liberating. Especially as women, we don’t normally get permission to keep ourselves safe. 

H: To close, you have this beautiful epigraph from Margaret Atwood, “Last year I abstained / this year I devour // without guilt / which is also an art.” The title “someone else’s hunger” recurs in multiple poems, so I don’t want to talk about “hunger,” because I feel like in the context of this book hunger belongs to someone other than the speaker. But if I’m thinking about the Atwood quotation there’s that word “devour”—what are you devouring lately? 

I: Well first let me say that the hunger that lives in all of us, that drives all of us, is universal. It belongs to you and it belongs to me. I think that’s one point the book tries to make. None of us are without fault. None of us are immune. Certainly, we should all strive to ensure that our hunger, our wounds, our voids, don’t cause hurt to other people– but so is the way of the world. We’re all just doing our  best to survive and as Jericho Brown writes, use the aftermath of our wounds “to get the living done.”

Now besides always consuming a lot of chocolate, one thing I’m really trying to devour or embody or embrace is the season of this book. It would be really easy to hide. But the work poets do is important—our work can change the world, it can even save a life. We’re so lucky that we get to work with a medium that is both potent and magical. My work really tries to honor the stories of my ancestors and of so many people who have been harmed, who haven’t felt beautiful, or who have felt beautiful and had their beauty taken, even had their lives taken. I really want to stay in a season of bravery for the book so that others might find the poems and too feel brave. That’s where I’m trying to concentrate all my energy right now. 

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ISABELLA DESENDI is a Latina poet and educator whose work has been published in POETRY, The Adroit Journal, Poetry Northwest, and others. Her chapbook Through the New Body won the Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship, and was published in 2020. Recently she has been named a New Jersey Poetry Fellow, was included in the 2024 Best New Poets anthology, and has been named a finalist for the Ruth Lilly Fellowship and Rattle‘s $15,000 Poetry Prize, among other awards. Isabella has attended Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop, the Storyknife Writers’ Residency in Alaska, and holds an MFA from Columbia University. She currently lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.

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