Hunger. That gnawing growl in the pit of your stomach. What, exactly, is it, and what is it we are hungry for? Truth? Knowledge? Love? Redemption? Survival? In Don Stinson’s quietly brilliant new collection, we Hunger for all of the above. And the craving is with us, right from the get-go, in the metamorphic opening poem, “The Black Dog”: “Sometimes it comes in the door / like a feather on the shoulder / of a shadow,” we are warned. It “casts no shadow, for your shadow / covers it completely, until only its eyes / remain, locking on yours until the dog / enters you like dark steam, and you feel /nothing, nothing at all.” Stinson weaves through a universe of possibilities, probabilities, pointlessness, illusions: a stoplight in Tulsa at which infinite paths present themselves upon the change from red to green; Rimbaud having a come to Jesus moment in a 1989 ICU room; Oklahoma cattle whispering, “You can be better…eyes turning / suddenly toward mine”; a Cherokee woman who stops and prays for roadkill. Hunger, then, is something like a decision, a death, a ritual, a denial, or, in “Homegrown Tomatoes,” “The beauty of dying summer / Melting on hungry tongues.” You will savor Stinson’s moveable feast long after the last wine goblet is drained.
-Robert L. Dean, Jr.
author of The Aerialist Will Not Be Performing
There’s a spiritual journey going on in Hunger, Don Stinson’s latest collection. He takes us meandering through cycles and years, and many lives, and voices in the mind – and always with a purpose. It is both a quiet and boisterous affair (wonderfully humorous at times, even) with “starlings backstroking the air” and hungry bears living in basements. These are mediations of comings & goings with ghosts, gods, dogs, trees, and a father’s glass eye, and through Stinson’s gifted vision we are wiser.
-Todd Fuller
author of To the Disappearance
Don Stinson’s Hunger tells a story of discovery – an enduring heart, still in process, making peace with memory, retaining child-like wonder now seasoned with the threat of emptiness. Stinson’s voice is determined and discerning.
- Ken Hada
author of Sunlight & Cedar
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