The poems in Anita Barrows’ We Are the Hunger take us to a place Seamus Heaney speaks of—where the frontier of nightmare meets the frontier of language. Reading her is like passing through an energy field where you come out sheened from a language where horror and loss are transformed by the fire of imagination and the healing music of poetry. She is both a political poet of witness and a lyric poet of stunning luminous moments; when these merge, we have a kind of poetry that is so necessary for our time, a vision of the whole. If there is loss there is also hope: “not to remain so long in sorrow/that we neglect to dwell also/in gladness.” Throughout her work she keeps alive the idea of individual responsibility in an age of relativism. Her voice is strong and unequivocal. “Let the words of our mouths / be as flame / rising from ruined lands, flame / rising from flame, undiminished.” These are essential poems, poems you want to live with, poems that help you live.
—Joseph Stroud, author of Of This World