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Eat or We Both Starve
A daring first collection from an exciting young Irish poet, tackling how to live with the past and not be consumed by it.
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.
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.
78 pages, Paperback
First published March 25, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 50 reviews
May 28, 2021
This audacious debut collection of fleshly poems is the best I’ve come across so far this year. The body is presented as a battleground: for the brain cancer that takes the poet’s father; for disordered eating that entwines with mummy issues; for the restructuring of pregnancy. Families break apart and fuse into new formations. Cannibalism and famine metaphors dredge up emotional states and religious doctrines.
Meat avoidance goes beyond principled vegetarianism to become a phobia. Like the female saints, the speaker will deny herself until she achieves spiritual enlightenment.
The title phrase comes from “Open Your Mouth,” in which the god Krishna, as a toddler, nourishes his mother with clay. A child feeding its mother reverses the expected situation, which is described in one of the book’s most striking poems, “Researching the Irish Famine.” The site of an old workhouse divulges buried horrors: “Mothers exhausted their own bodies / to produce milk. […] The starving / human / literally / consumes / itself.”
Corpses and meals; body odour and graves. There’s a pleasingly morbid cast to this collection, but it also has its lighter moments: the sexy “Paris Syndrome,” the low-stakes anxiety over pleasing one’s mother in “Guest Room,” and the playful closer, “Prayer to Audrey Hepburn” (“O Blessed Audrey of the feline eye-flick, jutting / bones, slim-hipped androgyny of war-time rationing”). Rich with imagery and alliteration, this is just my kind of poetry. Verse readalikes would include The Air Year by Caroline Bird, Flèche by Mary Jean Chan, and Tongues of Fire by Seán Hewitt, while in prose I was also reminded of Milk Fed by Melissa Broder and Sanatorium by Abi Palmer.
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
Where did I start?
Yes, with the heart, enlarged,
its chambers stretched through caring.
[…]
Oh is it in defiance or defeat, I don’t know,
I eat it anyway, raw, still warm.
The size of my fist, I love it.
(from the opening poem, “Learning to Eat My Mother, where My Mother Is the Teacher”)
Meat avoidance goes beyond principled vegetarianism to become a phobia. Like the female saints, the speaker will deny herself until she achieves spiritual enlightenment.
The therapist taps my shoulders, my head, my knees,
tells me I was a nun once, very strict.
This makes sense; I know how cleanly I like
to punish myself.
(from “Alternative Medicine”)
The title phrase comes from “Open Your Mouth,” in which the god Krishna, as a toddler, nourishes his mother with clay. A child feeding its mother reverses the expected situation, which is described in one of the book’s most striking poems, “Researching the Irish Famine.” The site of an old workhouse divulges buried horrors: “Mothers exhausted their own bodies / to produce milk. […] The starving / human / literally / consumes / itself.”
Corpses and meals; body odour and graves. There’s a pleasingly morbid cast to this collection, but it also has its lighter moments: the sexy “Paris Syndrome,” the low-stakes anxiety over pleasing one’s mother in “Guest Room,” and the playful closer, “Prayer to Audrey Hepburn” (“O Blessed Audrey of the feline eye-flick, jutting / bones, slim-hipped androgyny of war-time rationing”). Rich with imagery and alliteration, this is just my kind of poetry. Verse readalikes would include The Air Year by Caroline Bird, Flèche by Mary Jean Chan, and Tongues of Fire by Seán Hewitt, while in prose I was also reminded of Milk Fed by Melissa Broder and Sanatorium by Abi Palmer.
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
May 31, 2021
Complex, challenging, and deeply-felt, Eat or We Both Starve is a tour-de-force. Though some of Kennefick’s subjects are frequently explored in poetry – grief, loss of innocence, self-worth – her poems draw on a palette that feels entirely new. In her work, the body itself is not a safe space: digestion, hunger and any physical needs become dangerous. In “Anaemia”, hunger creates “My head / a barking dog; rabid, it drools.” Imagery of food and hunger pervades the collection, including a series of poems depicting the hunger strikes of saints, and ending with the author’s own “hunger strike”, as well as poems about the allure and danger of meat, the mother’s body as a site of cannibalism, and the ways in which a woman’s body is seen by the Catholic church. Though this collection so visceral that it at times becomes difficult to read, Kennefick writes with great care and imagination: the craft and consideration given to each poem is obvious, and the themes never feel overwrought or bathetic. This is a delicate balancing act, especially when looking at the female body as a site of so emotion and so much trauma, as in “January,” where, “Emptying myself / of all things ripe / and wanton, I am winter grass” or “Alternative Medicine”, in which the narrator describes confessing “that food squirms as if alive with maggots, / that I have shut my mouth to everything but words.”
I was impressed by how deeply Kennefick inhabits the bodies she describes, and the intense vulnerability of the collection, which is filtered and tempered by her pared-back, precise free-verse poems. The collection doesn’t give us any straightforward resolutions, but it also doesn’t abandon us to a place of despair: in one of the final poems, “Open Your Mouth,” which contains the title, the god Krishna discovers the universe by eating (“And within / that mouth another / universe / and within / that mouth / another”) and gives the reader a sense of the body becoming a place of tenderness as well as a battleground. This is echoed by the final poem, “Prayer to Audrey Hepburn”, in which Hepburn accepts the narrator exactly as she is (“I am too big to be a woman.”) The narrator addresses Hepburn saying, “you take my face in your hands, kiss me hard, / pushing your gorgeous tongue against the length of mine,” and gave me a feeling of acceptance and love. These final poems put the collection in context, allowing us to see the female body as both a place of danger and one of love. This is a fascinating and imaginative collection, crafted by a skilled poet, and is an important addition to Irish poetry as a whole.
I was impressed by how deeply Kennefick inhabits the bodies she describes, and the intense vulnerability of the collection, which is filtered and tempered by her pared-back, precise free-verse poems. The collection doesn’t give us any straightforward resolutions, but it also doesn’t abandon us to a place of despair: in one of the final poems, “Open Your Mouth,” which contains the title, the god Krishna discovers the universe by eating (“And within / that mouth another / universe / and within / that mouth / another”) and gives the reader a sense of the body becoming a place of tenderness as well as a battleground. This is echoed by the final poem, “Prayer to Audrey Hepburn”, in which Hepburn accepts the narrator exactly as she is (“I am too big to be a woman.”) The narrator addresses Hepburn saying, “you take my face in your hands, kiss me hard, / pushing your gorgeous tongue against the length of mine,” and gave me a feeling of acceptance and love. These final poems put the collection in context, allowing us to see the female body as both a place of danger and one of love. This is a fascinating and imaginative collection, crafted by a skilled poet, and is an important addition to Irish poetry as a whole.
May 12, 2022
Eat or We Both Starve by Victoria Kennefick is a delectable and exciting food-orientated collection. The poems are centred around young women’s bodies, how they are consumed by society and how young women can wrestle back power, often by intensely violent means.
Also the kit-kat themed cover design is iconic!
Also the kit-kat themed cover design is iconic!
June 11, 2021
Most of these poems are very good, but I was puzzled a bit by the presentation of the collection. There is a strong thematic thread that runs through that ties into the title and seems to be the main focus of the collection, but interspersed throughout are also a handful of random and unrelated poems. The ordering also was a bit confusing, as it’s difficult to get a grasp on who the speaker is meant to be, or whether the speaker is even intended as one coherent individual. There are poems that I absolutely love in here, and there is no doubt whatsoever of the poet’s talent within these pages, but as a collection I was not overly impressed, and more and more I tend to judge collections *as* collections, as whole books.
Read
July 19, 2022Now I bought this one because I was tired of seeing it win prizes & not having read it. I don't know precisely what that suggests for my expectations but suffice to say this is better than I had even imagined & I feel a touchstone for the decade I'm happy with this a representative.
There's a slant like Rachael Allen's perioracular veganism in Kingdomland though they're quite different poets -- a study in thematic correlation. Eat includes the mention of Cork's English Market which was wild to me because I had precisely the same headrush & ill feeling in there packed about by meatstalls. I ought to say that it's the best, most coherent & consistent collection on the topic of eating disorders which thread through the 'hunger strikes' of various saints/beatified - Catherine of Siena, Veronica Giuliani, Columba of Rieti, the author -- the poem What it Would Be Like to Eat a Girl really says so much already & the form! tight leash but daring.
Audrey Hepburn Moby Dick plethora of Plathisms but I'm resisting urges to quote at length -- consumed whole
There's a slant like Rachael Allen's perioracular veganism in Kingdomland though they're quite different poets -- a study in thematic correlation. Eat includes the mention of Cork's English Market which was wild to me because I had precisely the same headrush & ill feeling in there packed about by meatstalls. I ought to say that it's the best, most coherent & consistent collection on the topic of eating disorders which thread through the 'hunger strikes' of various saints/beatified - Catherine of Siena, Veronica Giuliani, Columba of Rieti, the author -- the poem What it Would Be Like to Eat a Girl really says so much already & the form! tight leash but daring.
Audrey Hepburn Moby Dick plethora of Plathisms but I'm resisting urges to quote at length -- consumed whole
February 22, 2022
An extremely well-lauded and feted collection, Victoria Kennefick's book of poems resists the beautiful lull in favour of the visceral. I tend to avoid 'fleshy' words (searing, tender, visceral), because they make a review feel like a sous-vide, but in the case of Kennefick's book the metaphors are justified. Kennefick writes about the act of controlling the self and about the relationship between food and the (female) body. The sensorial experience of food is key, as is refusing or ingesting it.
A consistent thread through this collection is the focus on the lives of female saints and celebrities. Through them, Kennefick looks at the nature of womanhood and the roles women were allowed to hold in pursuit of their independence. On the former category, she links her own experiences of disordered eating. These divine antecedents, such as Catherine of Sienna, Angela of Foligno, and Columba of Rieti, require some contextual understanding to grasp, but the writing is demotic and easy to get into.
My favourites, after reading this a few times now, are the opening poem, "Learning to Eat My Mother", and the poems "Beached Whale" and "Arctic Circle". The imagery here is especially fresh and well plotted, even in the free-verse form. Though I quibble with certain poem endings feeling too pat, and with the structure of the collection (which doesn't quite seem to end as clearly as it opens), the poems as a whole are opinionated and clearly voiced. I hope Kennefick writes longer poems in the future. It would potentially open up a wider range of structures and compositional styles.
A consistent thread through this collection is the focus on the lives of female saints and celebrities. Through them, Kennefick looks at the nature of womanhood and the roles women were allowed to hold in pursuit of their independence. On the former category, she links her own experiences of disordered eating. These divine antecedents, such as Catherine of Sienna, Angela of Foligno, and Columba of Rieti, require some contextual understanding to grasp, but the writing is demotic and easy to get into.
My favourites, after reading this a few times now, are the opening poem, "Learning to Eat My Mother", and the poems "Beached Whale" and "Arctic Circle". The imagery here is especially fresh and well plotted, even in the free-verse form. Though I quibble with certain poem endings feeling too pat, and with the structure of the collection (which doesn't quite seem to end as clearly as it opens), the poems as a whole are opinionated and clearly voiced. I hope Kennefick writes longer poems in the future. It would potentially open up a wider range of structures and compositional styles.
July 6, 2025
I can't think of the last time I've been so excited to discover a new (to me) poet. Both of Kennefick's books are incredible, will be eagerly awaiting the chance to read more of her work in the future.
December 5, 2021
Eat or We Both Starve is Victoria Kennefick’s first full collection of poetry.
There is a quote from Emily Dickenson, “If I read a book that makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know it is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” That, I think, is how I know too. The technical parts of poetry pass me by. My reactions are at an emotional level.
For me Victoria Kennefick’s collection does that. I read an interview with Kennefick – and sorry, I can’t remember where it was – where she said, “Writing is certainly an act of vulnerability for me and a powerful one.” And she talks about how her father’s death changed the way she wrote. It made her communication her feelings more direct. It isn’t necessarily direct autobiography, but its intention must be real.
She certainly does that here “A Prayer to Audrey Hepburn” and “In Hepstonstall” being good examples of that. Indeed, “In Hepstonstall” might be one of my favourite poems because – to me – it’s a poem about how poetry affects us.
There’s also a poem, “Swimming Lesson”, about nearly drowning. This is the second poem on that theme which I’ve read recently. The other being by Cynthia Miller in her collection, ‘Honorifics’. And again, having experienced something similar when I was a kid, it really does a good job of putting into poetry the feeling I went through:
“I was alive – my eight year old
Chest tight and sore
It surprised me
How quick
the surrender
underwater”
My favourite poems though are “Cork Girl Considers the GPO, Dublin 2016”, “A Young Girl Considers her Grandmother, Ballinamona Co. Cork, 1921” and “Researching the Irish Famine.” I wonder if this is because those are the three poems most directly related to Irish history. The latter links the famine to the Irish orphanages where children died:
“Babies died
Anyway. They all died. Wasted away
Like potatoes
In the ground. The whole
Country rotten.”
There are a suite* of poems scattered throughout the collection built on the lives of women Catholic Saints, which seem – to me again – to link physical hunger with spiritual hunger. I’m not a Catholic. Indeed, I was raised one of those half-arsed English schoolboy protestants so that pervasive religiousity wasn’t a part of my life. So, it is interesting how Kennefick uses that experience.
I harp on about this a lot but it is difficult to know whether what you see in a poem is what the poets intent was and perhaps it doesn’t matter but I do feel that Kennefick’s collection is an honest take on the events of her life: family, grief, history, religion, sex and love. There’s also a real sensuality – perhaps physicality might be the better word. I’m thinking particularly of the way she describes putting her fingers into the bullet holes of the GPO building as if they’re physical wounds, indeed in context it feels like a religious gesture like touching the wounds of Christ.
As usual I might be reading too much into it.
As usual I wonder if this is even a review.
Whatever it is I enjoyed this collection a lot.
*I keep using suite and I’ve no idea if it is the correct term but it works for me so I’m not sorry.
There is a quote from Emily Dickenson, “If I read a book that makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know it is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” That, I think, is how I know too. The technical parts of poetry pass me by. My reactions are at an emotional level.
For me Victoria Kennefick’s collection does that. I read an interview with Kennefick – and sorry, I can’t remember where it was – where she said, “Writing is certainly an act of vulnerability for me and a powerful one.” And she talks about how her father’s death changed the way she wrote. It made her communication her feelings more direct. It isn’t necessarily direct autobiography, but its intention must be real.
She certainly does that here “A Prayer to Audrey Hepburn” and “In Hepstonstall” being good examples of that. Indeed, “In Hepstonstall” might be one of my favourite poems because – to me – it’s a poem about how poetry affects us.
There’s also a poem, “Swimming Lesson”, about nearly drowning. This is the second poem on that theme which I’ve read recently. The other being by Cynthia Miller in her collection, ‘Honorifics’. And again, having experienced something similar when I was a kid, it really does a good job of putting into poetry the feeling I went through:
“I was alive – my eight year old
Chest tight and sore
It surprised me
How quick
the surrender
underwater”
My favourite poems though are “Cork Girl Considers the GPO, Dublin 2016”, “A Young Girl Considers her Grandmother, Ballinamona Co. Cork, 1921” and “Researching the Irish Famine.” I wonder if this is because those are the three poems most directly related to Irish history. The latter links the famine to the Irish orphanages where children died:
“Babies died
Anyway. They all died. Wasted away
Like potatoes
In the ground. The whole
Country rotten.”
There are a suite* of poems scattered throughout the collection built on the lives of women Catholic Saints, which seem – to me again – to link physical hunger with spiritual hunger. I’m not a Catholic. Indeed, I was raised one of those half-arsed English schoolboy protestants so that pervasive religiousity wasn’t a part of my life. So, it is interesting how Kennefick uses that experience.
I harp on about this a lot but it is difficult to know whether what you see in a poem is what the poets intent was and perhaps it doesn’t matter but I do feel that Kennefick’s collection is an honest take on the events of her life: family, grief, history, religion, sex and love. There’s also a real sensuality – perhaps physicality might be the better word. I’m thinking particularly of the way she describes putting her fingers into the bullet holes of the GPO building as if they’re physical wounds, indeed in context it feels like a religious gesture like touching the wounds of Christ.
As usual I might be reading too much into it.
As usual I wonder if this is even a review.
Whatever it is I enjoyed this collection a lot.
*I keep using suite and I’ve no idea if it is the correct term but it works for me so I’m not sorry.
October 4, 2023
found this in a secondhand bookstore a couple of days ago. sat down and read half of it in one go in the store. decided to pick it back up but i wanted to start from the beginning because the poems i remembered were so good. finished it just now and can’t wait to reread them. surprised this isn’t more popular, def gives dakota warren / on sun swallowing vibes.
September 21, 2024
Reading Eat or we both starve by Victoria Kennefick felt like an intense, endless conversation between sisters—a dialogue so raw and visceral, it pulls you in and holds you close. The writing grips you by the neck, shaking your core, compelling you to dig deep within yourself. The hunger, pain, and guilt thread through the poems, much like Eve’s first bite into the forbidden fruit—unearthing primal desires and sins. I couldn’t help but see parallels between Kennefick’s narrative and the story of Eve, with both embodying a longing for knowledge, hunger, and a defiance of expectations. Every page felt like I was listening to the big sister I never had, and I found myself fully immersed, hungry for more.
April 22, 2024
Emptying myself
of all things ripe
and wanton, I am winter grass.
of all things ripe
and wanton, I am winter grass.
July 23, 2022
A beautiful cathartic debut. I always love it when someone manages to take pain and suffering and make art so incredible out of it that it hurts to read it (in a good way).
If I eat Jesus will he want to eat me?
Think on that, not the chalice sloshing with blood. Soon it will be time
to stutter up the aisle, open my mouth and be fed–
*
In the Ordinary Time of your dark kitchen,
we drop tissuey tea bags into boiled water.
Rust whispers to transparency. Peace blooms,
bleeding into molecules, slowly.
*
I stood still
as a reed, curled out a cuckoo-voice, loud
sonic eruption from a space
between my diaphragm and sinuses. Together
we replicated an infinite hoop
familiar sound, whistle
of my half-siblings’ hearts plummeting
to earth, small wreckages smashed on lino
to be crushed again by my smug baby finger.
I did nothing but grow
bigger and bigger
my mouth open.
If I eat Jesus will he want to eat me?
Think on that, not the chalice sloshing with blood. Soon it will be time
to stutter up the aisle, open my mouth and be fed–
*
In the Ordinary Time of your dark kitchen,
we drop tissuey tea bags into boiled water.
Rust whispers to transparency. Peace blooms,
bleeding into molecules, slowly.
*
I stood still
as a reed, curled out a cuckoo-voice, loud
sonic eruption from a space
between my diaphragm and sinuses. Together
we replicated an infinite hoop
familiar sound, whistle
of my half-siblings’ hearts plummeting
to earth, small wreckages smashed on lino
to be crushed again by my smug baby finger.
I did nothing but grow
bigger and bigger
my mouth open.
February 2, 2024
as w most poetry there was some i really liked (honorable mention diet , burn baby burn and lighthouse ) and some i didn’t. unfortunately the ones i didn’t outweighed the ones i did.
January 21, 2025
I was stuck between a 2.5 and 3, but oh well.
Strengths: very good word play, Victoria has a beautiful way with words, taught me new things considering the very many historical figures recounted in it
Weaknesses: A tad too confusing too repetitively (I’d be like ‘what the HELL does this mean’), no rhyme schemes, no structure poetry (basically, it’s free verse like most if not all contemporary poetry)
My favorite poems in this book:
- Paris Syndrome
- Burn Baby Burn
- Family Planning (but I’ll say I LIKE it not love it)
- Hunger strikes Catherine of Siena
- Beached Whale
“Eat or we both starve” is grotesque, gorey, it has vivid imagery of cannibalism/flesh-eating, which is so my thing! I enjoyed that part of the book (sort of), but I would recommend against reading this book for those with:
- easily triggered eating disorders (or maybe it would be a good book for them too, depends)
- squeamish people
- those looking for something very deep and/or profound
My main problems with this book are the main issues I have with contemporary poetry in general. It’s too…free-verse for my liking. I will say, it had its moments for sure, but they were not nearly enough.
It’s bizarre. Which is both good and bad. I love bizarre things, but if something is so bizarre that you can’t really trust your interpretation of it….? I mean, poetry doesn’t need to make sense to everybody, but it needs to have a message. At least that’s what I believe— and there ARE many messages in this, but they are very surface level (I’d call them predictable in a novel).
The title and overall theme play well together which is always a good thing to me— tickles something in my brain. Some poems seem random. Some don’t make any sense but I guess that’s the purpose.
2.5/5
Strengths: very good word play, Victoria has a beautiful way with words, taught me new things considering the very many historical figures recounted in it
Weaknesses: A tad too confusing too repetitively (I’d be like ‘what the HELL does this mean’), no rhyme schemes, no structure poetry (basically, it’s free verse like most if not all contemporary poetry)
My favorite poems in this book:
- Paris Syndrome
- Burn Baby Burn
- Family Planning (but I’ll say I LIKE it not love it)
- Hunger strikes Catherine of Siena
- Beached Whale
“Eat or we both starve” is grotesque, gorey, it has vivid imagery of cannibalism/flesh-eating, which is so my thing! I enjoyed that part of the book (sort of), but I would recommend against reading this book for those with:
- easily triggered eating disorders (or maybe it would be a good book for them too, depends)
- squeamish people
- those looking for something very deep and/or profound
My main problems with this book are the main issues I have with contemporary poetry in general. It’s too…free-verse for my liking. I will say, it had its moments for sure, but they were not nearly enough.
It’s bizarre. Which is both good and bad. I love bizarre things, but if something is so bizarre that you can’t really trust your interpretation of it….? I mean, poetry doesn’t need to make sense to everybody, but it needs to have a message. At least that’s what I believe— and there ARE many messages in this, but they are very surface level (I’d call them predictable in a novel).
The title and overall theme play well together which is always a good thing to me— tickles something in my brain. Some poems seem random. Some don’t make any sense but I guess that’s the purpose.
2.5/5
January 21, 2023
This was a book selected (by a committee I am part of) for my Irish poetry group. Kennefick has won a number of awards in the past ten plus years, but this is her first book. Before I even read her poetry, on seeing her photograph, I perceived her as working to project an image with her bright red lipstick and Amy Winehouse style eye makeup.
In th small gathering of seven at the book group discussion, there were about half that were very positive about the collection. I was in the half who found her craft to be of a high quality, but I was not a fan of the content in many instances. Many of the poems centered on or featured blood. There were a lot of gruesome descriptions that led me to stop reading certain poems. Hunger was a focus, but not historical hunger. There was one poem about the Irish famine, but the others were more about the poet's issues with food - not eating meat, or at times, not eating at all. The poems were written over a number of years (5 to 10) although it was unclear how many. This was the factor that tipped me over into not being a fan of this collection. The poems did not have the same theses over and over because they were created for this collection, but because of the poet's artistic focus. I expect that these themes are what her writing will continue to focus on.
Adding to my impression that she is working hard to create an image, the details of her biography appear to be tightly controlled. She was a secondary school teacher but for how long? She is now (2022-2024) serving as Poet in Residence for the Yeats Society. There are readers who will love this collection, and probably people who will have a similar response to mine.
In th small gathering of seven at the book group discussion, there were about half that were very positive about the collection. I was in the half who found her craft to be of a high quality, but I was not a fan of the content in many instances. Many of the poems centered on or featured blood. There were a lot of gruesome descriptions that led me to stop reading certain poems. Hunger was a focus, but not historical hunger. There was one poem about the Irish famine, but the others were more about the poet's issues with food - not eating meat, or at times, not eating at all. The poems were written over a number of years (5 to 10) although it was unclear how many. This was the factor that tipped me over into not being a fan of this collection. The poems did not have the same theses over and over because they were created for this collection, but because of the poet's artistic focus. I expect that these themes are what her writing will continue to focus on.
Adding to my impression that she is working hard to create an image, the details of her biography appear to be tightly controlled. She was a secondary school teacher but for how long? She is now (2022-2024) serving as Poet in Residence for the Yeats Society. There are readers who will love this collection, and probably people who will have a similar response to mine.
January 21, 2025
“They say her bones barely held up pale skin, / sail-taut against the storm of winds / that prevailed night after night, / she fell away to nothing.” Victoria Kennefick’s debut poetry collection, Eat Or We Both Starve, has been a long time coming — her bold, award-winning pamphlet White Whale came out in 2015. It’s not surprising, reading the poems in Eat Or We Both Starve — the time and work is vividly manifest in Kennefick’s tightly crafted verse. In these poems hunger lurks, wide-eyed, cruel and unrelenting: the hunger of deprivation, the hunger of self-denial; physical, emotional, spiritual, sexual hungers, body and mind as weakened as they are enlivened. ‘January’, for instance, begins with a short sharp sentence: “I have begun the purge.” By the poem’s end, a lucidity poetic yet stilted, evocative of the shuddering faintness + torpor of true hunger: “See, I am transparent / as sunrise. / Starving, I count / my bones as valuable.” I love the way Kennefick dances with and around history as much as (auto)biography, the unobtrusive use of intertextuality, pop culture nods like in the poem ‘In Memory of Mary Tyler Moore’. Then there’s work of rage, relatable hate: “usually I’m more forgiving but / darling, as the wheels go round / and round I’d thrill to hear / your bones crunch underneath.” Kennefick plumbs the past and artfully renders and/or revises it, leading readers to a place of peace, trauma in the body sublimated stunningly into triumph.
December 27, 2022
(M)EAT
I sucked marrow from bones at dinner,
my father’s face a bloody grin of pride. I ate liver in chunks
for breakfast, pink and firm, jewels to adorn my insides.
I gloried in the feel of flesh, the exertion of the chew.
Holding my mother’s hand in the English Market,
I saw them – turkey chandeliers, plucked,
bruised purple eyelids dainty lightbulbs.
Their smell, fresh as the insides of my mouth.
Mother stroked my hair. There, there. I refused to eat
meat, became pillowy, meek. She hid muscle under mashed potato,
I tasted its tang in soup. Eat up, my parents said. I could not
swallow. My skin goose-pimple yellow, doctors drew blood
in tiny, regular sips. Teeth turned to glass and shattered
in my mouth. All I could taste was blood.
I sucked marrow from bones at dinner,
my father’s face a bloody grin of pride. I ate liver in chunks
for breakfast, pink and firm, jewels to adorn my insides.
I gloried in the feel of flesh, the exertion of the chew.
Holding my mother’s hand in the English Market,
I saw them – turkey chandeliers, plucked,
bruised purple eyelids dainty lightbulbs.
Their smell, fresh as the insides of my mouth.
Mother stroked my hair. There, there. I refused to eat
meat, became pillowy, meek. She hid muscle under mashed potato,
I tasted its tang in soup. Eat up, my parents said. I could not
swallow. My skin goose-pimple yellow, doctors drew blood
in tiny, regular sips. Teeth turned to glass and shattered
in my mouth. All I could taste was blood.
May 17, 2022
This brilliant collection is concerned with consumption. How women absorb religious and societal mores and how in return they are consumed by them. Kennefick's themes are traditional but her poems are modern and radical. In a world that puts tremendous pressure on women to be wraith-thin and beautiful, Kennefick explores the reality of size. Here you will find red-heads, interrogation-blue eyes, sewed-up mouths, a daughter yearning for a mother's touch, the female form, the body remembering. In her coming-of-age journey, grief, sexuality, and identity are looked at through the prism of diet - cannibalism, starvation, gluttony, and an insatiable universe.
Highly recommended.
Highly recommended.
July 23, 2023
The direct language makes it accessible to read - tender, challenging and unafraid - beautifully textured and crafted with visceral imagery of food and the body, will be returning to this many times
lost / inside that baby mouth/ the whole universe,
moving and unmoving creation.
and one of my favs, from I am cuckoo
I did nothing but grow/ bigger and bigger /
my mouth open.
lost / inside that baby mouth/ the whole universe,
moving and unmoving creation.
and one of my favs, from I am cuckoo
I did nothing but grow/ bigger and bigger /
my mouth open.
October 27, 2021
A wonderful, refreshing, original collection. Threaded throughout with links to food. Sensuous and richly linguistic with surprising combinations and ideas and images that work really well. I enjoyed this book a lot. Poems I will definitely return to. I remember reading her pamphlet a few years ago and being similarly struck.
February 12, 2022
Sorry, I just don’t understand why poetry has to be sordid or gross or downright pretentious and disrespectful.
These are the musings of a child, a not very nice child at that.
This isn’t poetry this is a kick in the face with a jackboot.
We are all being required to watch the Emperor’s clothes.
Not For Me.
“The Kids” is. a squillion times better than this nonsense.
These are the musings of a child, a not very nice child at that.
This isn’t poetry this is a kick in the face with a jackboot.
We are all being required to watch the Emperor’s clothes.
Not For Me.
“The Kids” is. a squillion times better than this nonsense.
April 4, 2022
Kennefick’s collection includes saints, hunger, anxiety, eating disorders, and much more. Some poems were so beautiful, and some were haunting. I found some of the poems confusing, but overall this was a good collection from a very interesting poet. My favorite poem was “Lighthouse.” I look forward to reading more from Victoria.
July 29, 2023
from 'Learning to Eat My Mother, Where My Mother is the Teacher'
I know what you're thinking, I left the brain.
No, not so. I have consumed
that organ piecemeal, sweet
morsels since my teeth came in, it tastes
like the sound
of sirens you don't know
are screaming until they suddenly stop. (8)
I know what you're thinking, I left the brain.
No, not so. I have consumed
that organ piecemeal, sweet
morsels since my teeth came in, it tastes
like the sound
of sirens you don't know
are screaming until they suddenly stop. (8)
Read
September 20, 2023Bound together by a theme of food, but not too repetitive. Definitely influenced by Plath, but also of its time and moment, gender and place. Unrelentingly honest, not unlike Plath. The writing is always straightforward and yet almost never veers into cliche... it almost refuses to be seen or considered until the end of the poem.
February 9, 2025
The language around consumption and the themes of the body, religion, womanhood, and eating are very well done in this collection. The imagery is provocative and attention holding. Personal favorites of mine were Swimming Lesson, Second Family, and Choke. Hoping to read Kennefick’s next collection very soon!
October 22, 2023
i haven’t read poetry in some time and got the urge today. the title of this book caught my eye and curiosity, and like the title itself, the poems also reminded me of luna miguel’s “los estómagos”. i’ve deeply enjoyed this read, and some verses keep resonating in my head through the day.
July 9, 2021
'Eat or we both starve' was a gripping read start to finish and I can see why the book and the author are generating such a buzz.
December 25, 2021
felt like it was written for someone else, but still interesting.
February 25, 2022
Visceral, and very cool. Made me kind of hungry.
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