Sudden Hunger

This is a book about desire: hunger for food and for the sensuality of physical life, for emotional communion, and for an understanding of the full meaning of life. ln the opening poem, an Athenian wife in the 5th century B.C. speaks with both rage and sexual longing for her indifferent, philandering husband, in another, a woman breaks a family taboo in seeking to know why her aging aunt never married, in another, an old woman in a nursing home tries to ask a young priest why God keeps her alive, lt is also a book about forms; the forms and rituals of the human body, of food, flowers, and weather, and the forms in nature that continually break out of themselves while our own emotional lives are held in check, while one by one wives, mothers, sisters, daughters, and lovers experience sudden hunger to make contact, to under- stand. This book is about the tension be- tween that hunger and the forms that try to contain it‘ That tension, skillfully balanced by one of the most exciting po