Join Isabella DeSendi in celebrating the launch of her debut full-length collection, Someone Else’s Hunger, on Friday, September 12th at 144 Montague Street! Doors will open at 6:30 PM and readings will begin at 7 PM. Matthew Gellman, Phil SaintDenisSanchez, m. mick powell & Chet’la Sebree will open for DeSendi.

About Someone Else’s Hunger

Dislocated in her own skin after a sexual assault, Isabella DeSendi wrestles with the thorny border between desire and appetite in her incandescent debut collection. Poised between her Cuban matrilineage and her first-generation adolescence in America, between assimilation and reclamation, between owning her own cravings and becoming a sacrifice to “someone else’s hunger,” these poems dissect our human obsession with beauty and the body. The poems in this collection use the lyric form to enact destruction and reparation as they attempt to reverse the vector of aesthetic power toward grace. Because Someone Else’s Hunger is beautiful, devastatingly so, it surveys violence, romance, eating disorders, structural racism, and socioeconomic inequality, all while yearning to still find beauty everywhere. At the nail salon, the speaker chooses red lacquer and the tech “paints the color of / anger or desire across the long lake of [her] nail”; in the city, where she feels like “an animal caught / in the sewer of [her] life” with “spring’s pink garbage / strewn into the streets while petals performed / their daily adagio down the avenue”; and behind her mother’s house, where she used to vomit at the lip of the reservoir, “where the water would congeal / then break like dough under [her] body’s simple rot.”

The expansive mercy of DeSendi’s breath-taking images is never more apparent than the moment they turn, as when she heralds the avian frenzy “in the moment right after a purge”: “always the miracle of birds arriving,” “a messy flurry…curious if any piece of me could be salvaged, was still good enough to be taken home to the other starlings to eat.” This speaker’s ability to see the tenacious tenderness that drives the scavenger, to recognize its creative intelligence for nourishment, belies the resuscitative artistry that never abandons her as she turns carrion into continuance, coming alive again. Someone Else’s Hunger subverts the revenge to recovery plot, arguing that the truest testament to the speaker’s inner strength is the resilience it took to survive. DeSendi formally moves between restraint and excess, illustrating the great courage required to relinquish the control she won back when she became the master of her suffering. But the reward of risking exposure, daring to open herself to the world and let herself feed off it? Abundance. The arrival of spring and “with it the audacious dirt,” this realization that “sometimes / in the breaking I am bettering / and in the bettering I am free.”

About the Poets:

Isabella DeSendi is a Latina poet and educator whose work has been published in Poetry, the Adroit Journal, Poetry Northwest, and others. Her debut poetry collection Someone Else’s Hunger will be published by Four Way Books on September 15, 2025. Her chapbook Through the New Body won the Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship and was published in 2020. Recently, she has been named a 2025 New Jersey Poetry Fellow, a finalist for the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and was included in the 2024 Best New Poets anthology, among other awards. Isabella has attended Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop, the Storyknife Writers’ Residency in Alaska, and holds an MFA from Columbia University. She currently lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Matthew Gellman’s first book, Beforelight, was selected by Tina Chang as the winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and was published by BOA Editions, Ltd. in 2024. His second book, The Understudy, is forthcoming from Four Way Books. Matthew has received awards and fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, Brooklyn Poets, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and elsewhere. His poems have appeared in Bennington Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, Gulf Coast, Poem-a-Day, and elsewhere. He lives in Los Angeles and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California.

Phil SaintDenisSanchez is a Creole poet from New Orleans. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, the Adroit Journal, Poetry International, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. His poem “monarchs are the communication medium for when i die” was a finalist for Poetry International’s C.P. Cavafy Prize and his chapbook watch out for falling bullets was a finalist for The Atlas Review’s and Button Poetry’s chapbook contests, and a notable manuscript for BOAAT’s chapbook contest. A semifinalist for the 2020 Discovery Prize, he has received scholarships to attend Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and presented at AWP on creating collaborations between poetry and music. His debut collection, before & after our bodies, is forthcoming on Button Poetry in 2025. He studied music theory and composition at The City College of New York, records under the name SaintDenisSanchez, and currently lives in Brooklyn.

m. mick powell is a poet, a professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies, an artist, an Aries, and the author of DEAD GIRL CAMEO. They enjoy chasing waterfalls and being in love.

Chet’la Sebree is the author of Field Study, winner of the 2020 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Mistress. Her third poetry collection Blue Opening and debut essay collection turn (w)here: essays on (be)longing are forthcoming in 2025 and 2026, respectively. She’s an assistant professor at The George Washington University and faculty in Randolph College’s Low-Residency MFA program.