Barrelhouse Reviews: Another Word for Hunger by Heather Bartlett
Reviewed by Emma Sheinbaum
Sundress Publications / June 2023 / 102 pp
Another Word for Hunger is a meditation on, and a mapping and exploration of, queer memory, emotional arcs, growing up, human connections, and desire. It addresses the hunger that eats at and feeds the speaker, the hunger she feels throughout her life, how her relationship with hunger shifts and evolves. The collection unpacks and constellates identity, touch, desire, origin stories, the stories we tell and retell ourselves.
When I ask Google to name the multitude of meanings for arc, Merriam-Webster offers: “the apparent path described above and below the horizon by a celestial body.” The speaker connects the dots within and surrounding her, connecting with others, with the you addressed in the book:
a glimpse
of you, but
it wasn’t you,
crossing the street—
until we both
go quiet in searching, letting
our eyes adjust to the dark,
waiting for something
to streak across the sky.
Maybe the dark is memory. Maybe the dark is the arc of her life, of her hunger, of her desire. Maybe the dark is actually the seeking, the shaping of an arc in a reality where there may only be experience – the story mined, the arc mind-made. Maybe “the apparent path” between the past, the present, the unpredictable and the speaker – the seeker – is paved with these poems; maybe all of these parts make up who she is. Maybe the poet is the celestial body, maybe this book is. I want to believe such a celestial body holds all of it, as celestial includes heavenly, divine and outer space. As holy (good) as the speaker’s queerness is, these poems’ narrative reflect an emotional history of feeling outer (other).
Bartlett repeatedly addresses and communicates with her selves, as in “These Lines,” for example: “These Lines / are not linear look: / this line is where you come out / this line is also tomorrow / tomorrow is also the girl / from yesterday.” As she strings pieces of herself together through memory, “this is what she says: / your memories are also / my memories wrapped / in silk and sewn / into the seams remember.”
When she asks what or who will feed her, will not only sustain but nourish her, the poems offer creativity as food. Maybe in making poems of these feelings and foundational memories, she is not just “waiting for something,” waiting for patterns in a larger constellation of experiences. Instead, perhaps, she feeds herself through nonlinear storying, since “these Lines / are not linear” — she feeds this hunger for meaning through retellings, through connecting with her younger selves. She urges, “Tell me how to hold my hands.”
Throughout the collection, the arc reflects the speaker’s learning and digesting that the relationship she has with herself is as the sun to her celestial body — that the connections within herself validate and empower her queerness. This book is a blessing – and “blessing is a story” – because of the relationship Bartlett builds with herself through trying to understand, trying to relive, trying to relieve the hunger that chews on her throughout time – “if it’s relief you want / start looking with your hands.” Through these poems, the speaker sifts through her memories as if deciphering and organizing a collection of postcards falling out of her hands.
Bartlett opens “Dear Eve” with a declaration:
the body knows two things:
how to recognize itself in the dark
& when to beg for more
The speaker responds with “you already know how to move / & recognize yourself in the dark.” Through these poems and the memory-work required to write them, the speaker recognizes herself in the dark, she learns how to beg for more. She negotiates with and navigates her identities, emotions, and experiences by way of the body – and she knows, tells us, reminds herself, that “your body is a contract with the living.”
The speaker’s body reaches for the connections between Eve’s experience and her own. She maps her desire across time, across a Biblical creation myth, across other celestial bodies to show us (and maybe convince herself) that desire is always a part of us. We are always seeking pleasure, not only within and with our bodies, but in the memory-work we do to understand ourselves, to unpack this hunger. “Dear Eve” reflects the motif that love comes with yearning, that hurt can come with pleasure.
Another Word for Hunger is an artifact of touching, time, and memory, and this resonates when Bartlett writes: “She said / you can believe something / by touching it.” The speaker seeks to believe in herself, her queerness, her memories, and the stories she tells. She touches these experiences of desire through poetry, shaping and reshaping previously wordless feelings by finding the words, clouded with memory and clarified with meaning.
A danger, a threat, exists in trying to real-ize hunger through touch. The speaker can sometimes be overwhelmed with this feeling of danger: “How far can you reach before / pulling back, before her words (the believing by touching) / melt with sweat, before / you say enough.” This memorywork, this de-dissociating, is akin to building a bonfire. A mesmerizing heat, a warning to burn. The speaker asks of us, of her selves, “Look: / fireflies are circling the flames / & you can’t tell / flightless embers from the deliberate / patterns of bugs.” Look, there are meaningful patterns amid the chaos, whether we see the significance in the moment or not. Look, the unpredictability amid our hungry bodies contain experiences that deepen and complicate the relationship we each have with our body. This collection sifts through, relives, and reflects on such experiences and emotions to learn about the self, to connect with and understand such desires.
The speaker doesn’t necessarily want her hunger, or maybe just doesn’t always feel comfortable always carrying it, stoking its fire. To cope, to familiarize herself, she invokes and reflects on and threads and pursues it – it’s clear through these poems she wants to be fed. She wants to be heard, to be seen, to be felt, to feel, knowing there will be feeling in response. She does find comfort in hunger’s familiarity – she tries to understand it, to understand herself and her story through her hunger. These poems reflect on and invoke the cyclicality and familiarity of hunger, yes, and also the body the hunger resides in: “[t]his body / is a cacophony of call / and recall.” Bartlett’s book doesn’t necessarily try to the answer the question that is hunger, although it does seek resolution:
Let the word roll over
in your mouth.
it feels like
memorizing lines of numbers
or verse, like falling into white heat, like
biting your lip. She wants you
to ask a question — no — she wants
an answer
Another Word for Hunger feels like a letter, an intimate and reflective conversation. It offers a vulnerable yet hopeful reply to the speaker’s own prompt nesting in “Go Like This,” quoted just above: “Write a letter / that’s only for you. Start / like this: I no longer believe / in black and white. Carry it with you / in the blue-black dark.” An exhale after a lifetime of constricting inhales, and the exhale lies in the speaker recognizing:
every word is a turn.
where do we go from here:
back into your hand.
the body knows
we can go anywhere from here
please
Heather Bartlett’s words turn, and the speaker’s rumbling hunger resonates. Bartlett’s poems reminded my own celestial, queer body that we can go anywhere, can create our own arcs. I feel my body respond with an exhale that sounds like please.
Emma Sheinbaum writes essays, video-essays/cine-poetry, and poems. She is Co-Founding Editor of the genreless literary journal A Velvet Giant. Her writing is published by Cobra Milk, TriQuarterly, Milk Press, Metatron Press, Juked, Cherub Magazine, The InQueery, and Glass Mountain, among others. She has been awarded writing residencies from The Poetry Society of New York and The Sundress Academy for the Arts. Emma has also taught essay and multimedia writing. Learn more at www.emmasheinbaum.com.