Fell Hunger, Joseph Lennon’s first volume of poetry, gathers a body of work from twenty years of writing. The poems, most derived from the sonnet, reflect on living for many years with an undiagnosed illness, coeliac disease. These reflections are interlaced with childhood memories and experiences of living in New York City, Ireland, Italy, and elsewhere. The voice of the poems often wrestles with dualities—pain and grace; home and away; violence and hope; sickness and health; religion and disillusionment; heritage and baggage. Seeking new resolutions, the poems then offer soft imperatives of harmony, endurance, and recovery.
The poems in Joseph Lennon’s debut collection engage—in a deep, plainspoken, unfussed way—childhood memories (a street fight, a wild friend, an unidentified illness), offer samples of the quotidian, passing world (a woman at a bus stop, a bullet lodged in a tree, a painting by Vermeer), or celebrate the complicated reality that is family. Whether set in Ireland or America, India or Italy, the poems are alive with sharp-eyed, often elegiac, epiphanies in a universe of blessedly concrete facts, achieving, again and again, honest emotional lift-off. Eamon Grennan
Joseph Lennon’s intimate poems investigate “the borders that kept me from knowing / the place I am” and take the reader on a radical journey of discovery where “poison grew like grass.” Illinois is conjured on a road in Ireland, and “harmonies land as cupped berries.” His warm attention to the wider world around him is unflinching so the observed detail illuminates an internal state, where the body gives way to the spirit, and the line to music. These are poems of witness and illumination that urge us to “listen for what is not heard.” Catherine Phil MacCarthy
The poems of Fell Hunger
range warmly and ruefully across the scales of place and displacement—from the American heartland to the lost “family country” of Ireland to Rapallo and Mumbai—and so doing manage to turn the genre of bildungsroman into a transnational narrative of longing and witness. This deftly assembled orchestration of sonnets and free-verse narratives offers the recognition that, while we may be “from places we do not know,” such loss is also “the seed of hunger.” Fell Hunger
is an artful and urgent record of discovery and recovery. Daniel Tobin
