The Authority of Hunger: Poems

Two rivers course through Ruth Goring's poems: a cold river of hunger, a shimmering river of joy. The reader rides these deep waters with the poet, encountering a world whose hunger carries holiness. On a city bus, recorded announcements become a liturgy; the poet walks in snowfall and hears spirits whispering from the ground; late-night jazz improvisation transmutes to ecstatic church. Goring is a world citizen, attentive to hunger for justice among families of the disappeared in Colombia, doctors in Syria, West Bank teenagers. The English language with all its riches is insufficient for this hunger, and so Spanish tumbles onto the page from time to time, sometimes in entire poems with elegant translations.The Authority of Hunger opens up a ravine of vulnerability, "the murk / born in me," trusting the reader as a companion and fellow pilgrim. We enter an intimacy both public and private: love, neocolonialism, racism, personal violations, loneliness, unbearable family stories, forgiveness, mending. In this "physical humidity of thought," Goring's words become garments for our own grief, bread to assuage our hunger.