All These Hungers

"Turn my hungers. Feed, hungers, in the meadows of sounds," wrote our crazed surrealist French poet, Arthur Rimbaud, over one hundred years ago. Talented, candid, intellectually nimble, neither crazed nor surreal, Rick Mulkey turns on his hungers, turns Rimbaud into something American, small town scrappy, transparent and musky: these memorable poems land on the tongue and in the brain and center on the stomach. Whisky, beans, peppered pork belly bacon, lemonade, unclean scrambled eggs, very cold sweet tea, onions, beets, tomatoes, wine, beer - the poems overflow with juice. These poems celebrate sex - "the salty taste of the body's hidden flesh" and excrement - "there's the kind beetles roll into balls across the savannah." These Rabelaisian poems have a nose for the ground that smells "like dusty clocks." More Roethke than Whitman, more Hogarth than Gainsborough, this book's gritty lyric excretes an aroma that lingers. This book honors what many lost in the world's worst pandemic: taste and smell. -Spencer Reece