I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers from the World

Kendra DeColo is the author of three poetry collections: I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers from the World (BOA Editions, 2021), My Dinner with Ron Jeremy (Third Man Books, 2016), and Thieves in the Afterlife (Saturnalia Books, 2014), selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the 2013 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. She is a recipient of a 2019 Poetry Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and has received awards and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Millay Colony, Split this Rock, and the Tennessee Arts Commission. Her poems and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, Tin House, Waxwing, Los Angeles Review, Bitch Magazine, VIDA, and elsewhere. She has taught creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and Vanderbilt University. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

“I have always loved Kendra DeColo’s poems, so it’s no surprise that I love this new book, I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers From the World. But I love it so much. DeColo somehow manages to write poems that are equal parts swagger and soft, equal parts holler and prayer. Poems that are irreverent and dead serious, playful and pained, built of precise and impeccable and raucous music. Poems wonderful and strange and luminous, as is everything when you look, when you feel, as hard, and beautifully, as DeColo does.”—Ross Gay, author of The Book of Delights: Essays“The great magic of Kendra DeColo's poems has always felt, to me, like she knows something you also know, even if you don't know that you know it. Not just a movie, but a specific moment from a movie. A commercial you might not remember. Each of her poems reveals something about how one memory can become shared. Through joy, through terror, through rage. There is a generosity that flows through this book, not just in the intimate poems about giving life and then caring for a life, but also the poems that slowly, gently circle food courts, or open with off-brand granola bars. This book and these poems are a true testament to how intimacy and generosity can take as many forms as a writer needs you to see them in.”—Hanif Abdurraqib, author of A Fortune for Your Disaster“This collection of glorious, powerful, dare I say iconic poems blew through me like strong weather. I felt electric, inspired and understood. Kendra DeColo writes about the body, motherhood and desire as sites for intense transformation, and having read them, I feel transformed.”—Michelle Tea, author of Against Memoir“I find Kendra DeColo’s poems almost unbelievably good. Shockingly good. So of the moment, so funny and yet so terrifyingly, intensely beautiful. I know most wouldn’t find it at all unusual to have those things at once, so my response to them is perhaps more of a statement of my own positionality. Still, in a weird world turned upside down, poems like “I Would Like to Tell the President to Eat a Dick in a Non-Homophobic Way” and “I am thinking about the movie Con Air” feed me with their humor, whimsy, and pathos.”—Kazim Ali, author of The Oasis of Now