Someone Else’s Hunger

In her blistering debut, DeSendi turns an unflinching eye on the experience of surviving sexual assault, as well as the patriarchal and nativist systemic violence that victimizes women and members of racialized communities in the United States. DeSendi’s speaker has been harmed and is “the goddess Kali—all sex & death/ in her garland of skulls.” Elsewhere, she invokes Herodias and her infamous revenge on John the Baptist: “Herodias, teach me not to feel/ regret, to like the sound a neck makes// when it breaks, the blade cleaving/ clean through bone.” With piercing clarity, DeSendi explores the psychological underpinnings of an eating disorder as a means of controlling the body for one who has been disembodied by sexual assault. The memory of the assault is inseparable from the speaker’s dehumanization by the state as a first-generation immigrant from Cuba. This parallel is established in the opening poem, in which the speaker recalls watching her grandmother cut a rooster’s throat, and being told to “be fearless & god-fearing/ as any white man.” The result is a monumental work of investigating and archiving the body and its will to survive and thrive in a hostile environment. (Sept.)