Eat or We Both Starve
(By Victoria Kennefick)
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| Author | Victoria Kennefick |
These poems explore the sense of powerlessness a young woman feels growing from childhood to adulthood in a predominantly Irish Catholic society. Restricted, she deems herself simultaneously too small and too big, an Alice in Wonderland. The poems develop an identity cobbled together with scraps from the Bible, snippets of film, favourite poems, the lives of the saints, and a kaleidoscope of memories, and track what emerges when that identity is not sturdy enough to sustain her. Faced with the loss of a loved one and the shock of her own mortality, a weight she has carried subconsciously since childhood, her fragile façade shatters at her feet like porcelain.
The collection viscerally explores bereavement, sex and the defiant female body coming-of-age in Catholic Ireland. Its themes of identity, relationships, sexuality and food, are universal, broad-ranging and would resonate with readers who connect with other young female Irish writers like Sally Rooney, Naoise Dolan and Caoilinn Hughes. The language is vivid, unexpected, intimate and engaging beckoning the reader through the some-times challenging, often unsettling world of a disappearing Catholic Ireland to a newer, shinier psychic space.”
