We are Starved
82 pages, 6 11/20 x 8 13/25
Paperback
Release Date:15 Jun 2011
ISBN:9781885635174
We are Starved
By Joshua Kryah
SERIES:
Mountain West Poetry Series
University Press of Colorado, Center for Literary Publishing
"Joshua Kryah is redefining what it means to write spiritual poetry. This is not another book about longings for the spiritual; this is a book of offerings to the spiritual. These poems answer the plea of Yeats's spirits ('We are starved') and give them what they crave, depicting the particulars of human appetite and the way each 'peculiar and appalling hunger' unfolds. The scope of these poems is dizzying; they echo and glitter and sear as they, against all odds, give us a'world [that] is/suddener than any idea about the world.' We Are Starved is unabashed and unflinching, and it is deeply, exquisitely satisfying."
-Mary Szybist, author of Granted
Mountain West Poetry Series
Published by the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University
-Mary Szybist, author of Granted
Mountain West Poetry Series
Published by the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University
Through the jagged couplets and one-line stanzas of Kryah's second collection of poems runs an unsettling but graceful drama of consumption and consolation... Kryah opens up a space in which the reality of the body can be explored and made significant without sacrificing the metaphysical.'
—Publisher's Weekly
In haunted days more filled with violence than grace, Joshua Kryah has found the sacred, a way to be amazed at how 'you can move among the world's misfortune/and still consider it good.' We Are Starved's breathtakingly mature poems are fueled by a man's internal combustion, the tremendous labor it is to live well 'to be a father, a lover, a son' in a fallible world. There's a gorgeous, seeking darkness swelling the heart of We Are Starved, one that marks Kryah as among contemporary poetry's finest young voices.'
—Alex Lemon, author of Happy: A Memoir and Fancy Beasts
Kryah's lines are full of figurative grace: The images stun and accumulate. We Are Starved introduces an important poetic vision, a surprising and exciting voice.'
—Laura Kasischke, author of Space, in Chains and The Raising
Joshua Kryah was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a Ph.D. from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he was a Schaeffer Fellow in poetry. His first collection of poems, Glean (2007), won the Nightboat Poetry Prize. He lives with his wife and two children in Las Vegas and teaches at UNLV. He is also the poetry editor of Witness.
