A Careful Hunger: Poems
About this ebook
Revealed is the story of a woman's inner life—an intimate tale of abuse and personal struggle— from a traumatic childhood through marriage, parenthood, and lifelong friendships. Based on the final manuscript that was drafted before the author's death, this compilation traces the path of a woman finding her poetic voice in middle age, returning to an often-harrowing upbringing while closely observing the natural world—especially the populations of birds moving through the space between her back porch and the lake below—and meditating on the nature of creativity. With a submerged narrative behind the poems and several calls to nature through repeated motifs, the poet shares seminal emotions and experiences.
A Careful Hunger is the last creative testament of this extraordinary artist—her final act of fearlessness in a troubled yet joyful life. In the words of the poet: "I am alive and must say so / one way or another."
About the author
Judy Young (1940–2015) was a graduate of Transylvania University and later earned an MFA in creative writing from Warren Wilson College. John K. Young is a professor in the English department at Marshall University, specializing in histories of textual production in the American and British literatures of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He is the author of Black Writers, White Publishers: Marketplace Politics in Twentieth-Century African American Literature, How to Revise a True War Story: Tim O'Brien's Process of Textual Production, and the coeditor, with George Hutchinson, of Publishing Blackness: Textual Constructions of Race Since 1850.
