Eat or We Both Starve
Eat or We Both Starve by Victoria Kennefick is our poetry recommendation for August and is available for purchase on the Seaside Books online shop. Victoria Kennefick is a poet, writer, and teacher from Shanagarry, Co. Cork, now based in Co. Kerry. She holds a doctorate in English from University College Cork and studied at Emory University and Georgia College and State University as part of a Fulbright Scholarship.
Her pamphlet, White Whale (Southword Editions, 2015), won the Munster Literature Centre Fool for Poetry Chapbook Competition and the Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Poetry Review, PN Review, Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, Poetry News, Prelude, Copper Nickel, The Irish Times, Ambit, bath magg, Banshee, and elsewhere. She won the 2013 Red Line Book Festival Poetry Prize and many of her poems have also been anthologized and broadcast on national radio stations.
A recipient of a Next Generation Artist Award from the Arts Council of Ireland, she has also received bursaries from Kerry County Council and Words Ireland. She was a co-host of the Unlaunched Books Podcast and is on the committee of Listowel Writers’ Week, Ireland’s longest-running literary festival.
As I always say, when writing about a book I think it is helpful to include the blurb as this is what folks might first read if they picked up this book in a bookshop. We are told:
Victoria Kennefick's daring first book, Eat or We Both Starve, draws readers into seemingly recognisable set-pieces - the family home, the shared meal, the rituals of historical occasions, desire - but Kennefick forges this material into new shapes, making them viable again for exploring what it is to live with the past - and not to be consumed by it.
Rebecca Goss writes: 'Victoria Kennefick writes with a fresh urgency, giving us poems that are honest and fearless. She once said: "Poetry has saved my life, made my life. Reading and writing it have taught me bravery and discipline." Kennefick is unafraid to explore bereavement, sex, and the female body in her poetry. She writes with a visceral originality. Her poems are rich with physical sensations.
She is able to find beauty in the big subjects like sorrow and desire, offering us the finest, most startling details. Her identity as a young Irish woman is hugely important to her, something she explores with intelligence and candour. I have always felt there is nothing Victoria could not tackle.
The scope in her work is exhilarating.'
This month I’m doing The Sealey Challenge, created by the poet Nicole Sealey. The goal is to read a collection of poetry every day in August. I was excited to include this collection in the list. I’ve mentioned before that I love poetry that isn’t afraid to dive into the weird and surreal, and this collection does that while also grounding in the everyday messiness of life.
The collection opens with Learning to Eat My Mother, Where My Mother is the Teacher which features the speaker eating their mother’s organs. It is gory and raw, a metaphor for the relationships between mothers and daughters, that tension of never feeling good enough but there is also an element of love and care in the animalistic images. It is a strong opening and sets the tone for all the weird layers within this collection. The threads that run through these poems are desire, consumption, family, the female body, and exploration of the past. These themes make the collection work well as a whole.
One of the elements I enjoyed most about this collection was the inclusion of poems written in the voice of a historical figure who is on a hunger strike. We are introduced to Catherine of Siena, Angela of Foligno, Veronica Giuliani, and other women who were devout Catholics, some becoming saints. All of these women engaged in hunger strikes and fasting either in protest or as part of a demonstration of faith. As we read the collection, it is clear that Kennefick is discussing her relationship with food and how hunger and the size of our bodies can become a point of trauma and grief for young women in today’s world. Having these historic references peppered throughout let us see that Kennefick is addressing more than just physical hunger but also is presenting themes around desire and consumption. For these women, hunger is related to power and their ability to assert their faith. Hunger in the context of modern beauty standards is also directly connected to power. We then land on the poem Hunger Strikes Victoria Kennefick and see her reflect her own experience of hunger within the history brought to light in the previous hunger strikes poems. It is a really brilliant way to pace the collection.
I enjoyed how Kennifick plays with form and shape on the page. Some poems are placed in a traditional column while others flow in curves across the page. One of my favorites in the collection is Open Your Mouth, which uses indention to make the poem visually engaging and compliments the narrative structure of the piece. As a side note, this is the poem that contains the collection’s title. Another poem with a unique structure is Choke which uses indention and stanza to highlight the different events discussed in the piece. I find collections that do this really fun to read. It makes each work a surprise.
Many of the poems have a lyrical, dreamy, fairy tale quality which I really enjoyed. The poems are narrative, often telling a complete story or painting a moment with a clear setting and characters. For example, in (M)eat we are told a story about how as a child, the speaker ate meat until she went to a market with her mother and saw turkeys hanging up for purchase. This caused her to refuse to eat meat to the point where she becomes sick and needs medical treatment. The rhythm and language used give me the sense that I am reading about a legend or myth within Kennefick’s life and origin story.
As someone who has struggled with disordered eating and poor body image, I appreciated the way that Kennefick talks about the female body and how small moments in childhood can have a lasting negative impact on how we see and think about ourselves. A Young Girl Discovers Her Reflection, Big Girl, and Diet are just a few of the poems I enjoyed that dealt with the theme of body size and body image.
I really related to A Young Girl Discovers Her Reflection, which has a lovely rhythm and internal rhyme that gives it a lyrical quality. The poem is about a young girl coming to understand that how we see ourselves doesn’t always match what others see. It is heartbreaking and a moment that I remember from my own childhood. The lines that stuck with me are, “After Mass, adults cast their gaze down,/ eye-scales weighing us. I watched how distorted and untidy I became/ in glass diamonds on the chapel door; the priest called me a big girl.” It perfectly captures a small moment that changes the course of someone’s life.
Some other favorites in the collection are Prayer to Audrey Hepburn, Smell Dating, Beached Whale, Second Family, and I Don’t Know What to Do With Myself. I think this collection would be perfect for someone who is just starting to get into poetry. The language is accessible, many of the poems have a clear narrative arc, and the collection works together as a whole. For people who are regular poetry readers, I think you will love exploring the themes in the collection.
Have you read this collection? Are you planning to pick it up? I would love to connect with you about Eat or We Both Starve over on our social media pages.
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