Cover Art: Emilio Villalba
Cover & Interior Design: Alban Fischer
Paperback | 98 Pages
Sept 1, 2020 | ISBN 978-1-936919-84-0
About Gale Marie Thompson
Gale Marie Thompson is the author of Helen Or My Hunger (YesYes Books, 2020), Soldier On (Tupelo Press, 2015), and two chapbooks, including Expeditions to the Polar Seas (Sixth Finch, 2013). Raised in Georgia and South Carolina, Gale received a B.A. from the College of Charleston, an M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a Ph.D. in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Georgia. Her work has appeared in Crazyhorse, American Poetry Review, BOAAT, Gulf Coast, Tin House Online, Guernica, jubilat, and Bennington Review, among others. She has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts and has given workshops and craft talks for the Emily Dickinson Museum, O, Miami Foundation, Midwest Writing Center, and others. Gale is the founding editor of Jellyfish Poetry and has worked on the editorial teams of jubilat, Crazyhorse, Fairy Tale Review, Georgia Review, and Slope Editions. She lives in the mountains of North Georgia, where she directs the creative writing program at Young Harris College.
Helen or My Hunger
Helen Or My Hunger is here!
About Helen Or My Hunger
In Helen or My Hunger, Gale Marie Thompson explores notions of beauty and the body in ways that illuminate—and damn—both the personal and historical. How do we become fully human in a world that conspires to reduce us both figuratively and literally? Thompson digs into these difficult questions and their tough answers, and the results are nimble, inventive, beautiful poems, as pleasurable to read as they are important to digest.
—Lynn Melnick, author of Landscape with Sex and Violence
Every woman is a Trojan horse. Her body, crafted, redacted, angled, gets you through the gates. But what does it conceal? Complexity, time, betrayal, urgency? "I AM IN PAIN AND THEREFORE MY WRITING IS THIS WAY" says Thompson’s speaker. The poem, too, a Trojan horse and a "catch-all," a place to bide one's time, to sift through longing, to become liquid again. "Helen, I see myself edging bright to you / I need your lineage / your tender voltage." And we do. See you on the banks of hunger, sisters.
—Danielle Pafunda, author of Spite
