Near the river cherry blossoms ripe pink as wounds against the sky

A Conversation with Isabella DeSendi about Someone Else’s Hunger

Isabella DeSendi’s Someone Else’s Hunger begins: “Once, while disemboweling the chicken/ readying it for my lover’s dinner, I remembered/ my abuela slashing the rooster’s throat.” In the opening poem, the sacrificed bird becomes an alter ego or foil for the human speaker. This transmutation occurs elsewhere in DeSendi’s debut poetry collection, where the speaker’s boiling discontent towards the metaphorical decapitation of Latina women deemed “brutish, warlike,” whose “kinky hair” is deemed “abominable” and painted vivid as the Fury shade of red the speaker chooses for her manicure. DeSendi garlands her particular experiences as a Cuban-American paying homage to her mother and abuela. In moving beyond toxic relationships, “half-relieved and grieving,” and in refusing to buy into the idea of naming the perpetrator of violence, DeSendi chooses empowerment, declaring “I hold his skull in my hand. / Besides, I want the gods to suffer.”

Isabella DeSendi is a Latina poet and educator whose work has been published in POETRY, The Adroit Journal, Poetry Northwest, and others. Her debut poetry collection titled "Someone Else's Hunger" will be published by Four Way Books on September 15, 2025. Her chapbook "Through the New Body" won the Poetry Society of America's Chapbook Fellowship and was published in 2020. Recently, she has been named a 2025 New Jersey Poetry Fellow, a finalist for the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and was included in the 2024 Best New Poets anthology, among other awards. Isabella has attended Bread Loaf Writers' Workshop, the Storyknife Writers’ Residency in Alaska, and holds an MFA from Columbia University. She currently lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Tiffany Troy: How does the first poem, “Once, while disemboweling the chicken” introduce the readers for the poems that follow? In it you introduce the idea of “someone else’s hunger,” writing “I thought the tick to surviving/ this country was to be good or beautiful/ or merciless like its people, but choosing didn’t matter—/ soon I’d be pinned in a bed like an animal/ while someone else’s hunger made a sacrifice of me.”

Isabella DeSendi: In my mind, this poem is a sort of self mythology about hunger, and the relationship to hunger I explore throughout the book. It begins with the story of my abuela practicing Santeria by specifically looking at the ways religion teaches us that self abandonment, sacrifice, the mutilation of a living thing, can prove one’s virtue, loyalty to God. The idea that there is this link between human and deity, the conduit of which is this sort of violent membrane, has always intrigued me. For example, there’s this story in the Bible where God asks a father to carry his son up a mountain and kill him as proof of his love and devotion. And although God has mercy and doesn’t require the killing, the act of being willing to kill, to surrender the only thing of value in the father’s life, is what God demands from the father to prove his love, his goodness, his dedication. For much of my life, I believed this kind of surrender, self-sacrifice, was also required of me to prove I too could be loved. It also taught me that violence and love were not inextricable– that oftentimes, injury and worship could often coexist. 

It is hard not to be consumed with thoughts of violence when you grow up in a home influenced by the Christian religion. In this poem specifically, I saw an interesting connection to myself and the sacrificed chicken. Weren’t we both just innocent animals before the world had their way with us, harmed us? Weren’t we both pinned on a bed, on an altar, for the sake of satisfying someone else’s desire to get closer to the ineffable void that lives in them? We were terrified. We were afraid of the hands that held us down.  

Opening the book with this poem allows me to introduce the reader to some of the obsessions I reckon with. It also spotlights my specific wounds and tethers them to my ancestors whose longing for acceptance and forgiveness inarguably left an important imprint on me. 

TT: The idea of self mythology, as influenced by your family, particularly your abuela and mother, is moving. What was the process like, in the writing of your debut poetry collection? 

IDS: I started writing this book in 2015 and first relied mostly on the histories of other women to help me find the courage to untangle truths I was wrestling with, but didn’t have the courage to face or name. Eve, Eurydice, Medusa, Mary– they all helped me face myself when I was still too scared to confront my shadows directly. In learning their stories, in writing for them, I found a blueprint and audacity to confront my own wounds. And as I practiced saying the thing that needed to be said, one line at a time, I felt empowered, like I was coming back to myself in a way that felt sincere and strengthening. By the time I finished the book in 2023, I had become a new woman. Don’t get me wrong– I think it’s phony for any of us to say we are completely healed, but the act of writing these poems did help me be more honest with myself, and this was a kind of salvation. 

TT: In your acknowledgements you thank the “many people without whom the poems in this book would not be possible—my life would not be possible.” Then in “Ars Poética en el Museo del Prado,” you write, “Why can’t I just say I’ve lost someone I love—/ someone who couldn’t look past my flaws and now/ I’m writing this stupid poem to ignore that simple fact.” What is the act of writing poetry to you?

IDS: I think what this question is really asking is how relationships impact the way I maneuver my way through the poems, and the inside scoop is this: poems have always been a place for me to call out my abuser, the oppressors. They’re a place for me to put my rage, my grief– but they’ve also taught me that admitting my grief doesn’t make me weak. Neither does loving or longing. Typically, the people I am writing for or about have either wounded me or loved me, sometimes both. In examining these relationships through poems, I often learn something about myself or the world I didn’t know before, and this is why, I think, we must keep on going and trusting, even when it hurts. 

TT: What I admire about your poetry is how it holds space for ambivalence and conflicting feelings for the other. How did you land on the four sections of the collection? What do you feel is the arc or structure within the sections?

IDS: If I had to be prescriptive about the sections, I would categorize them like this: Section 1 introduces the speaker fresh with all her bruises. It announces her wounds, shadows, obsessions. In this section her rage is still very sharp and hot; it’s the lens through which she understands the world. The second section is more relational– exploring the interconnectedness between love and violence, beauty and death. There is a sense that the speaker wants better for herself, but still feels burdened, trapped, in her tainted view of the world. In the third section, the speaker is finally stepping into a new world of womanhood. Most of the poems I wrote when I first moved to New York live here, and New York taught me so much about independence, friendship, desire– having the courage to hope but to also let the old ways go. The final section of the book is where I think the speaker truly finds her strength. Here, she accepts her body– through dance, through bodybuilding, through the experience of a new kind of stable love. I wouldn’t say the rage has disappeared, but it’s alchemized into something tangible she can use to operate more securely in the world. Her biggest weapon? Not rage, but acceptance, courage, self-appreciation, love. 

TT: That myth making (or alchemy, as you put it) is linked within the collection to the present-day news cycle, with the Twitter post of someone who was offended by Jennifer Lopez and Shakira’s 2020 half time performance, the murder of Sheila Abdus-Salaam, and the overturning of Roe v. Wade. You write, “Maybe the problem/ with the living isn’t their sorrow/ it’s that they’re still capable/ of violence.” How does the political become personal in your poems?

IDS: There are plenty of poets who have probably answered this more succinctly than I could, but this question makes me think first of June Jordan, who I found at 20 and immediately loved. Her work is a great example of how the political is always personal. If you live in the world, if you care about others, how can it not be? In witnessing how women, specifically women from marginalized communities, are demonized and weaponized and othered in America, I was able to claim a source of rage I will probably reckon with forever– but poems are a place where contradictions can coexist. One of the things I love about being brown, about being Latina, is both my tenderness and my ferocity. Because I exist I am political. If anything, I hope the poems illustrate how the women I love and admire are multitudinous, capable of both softness and grit, and that this is something we shouldn’t erase but accept– or as Jericho Brown writes, use to get the living done. 

TT: What are you working on today?

IDS: I’ve shared this recently but I’m currently working on a collection of essays about fitness. In the past few years, I’ve become a competitive bodybuilder which has informed so much of how I think about my place in the world now compared to how I thought of it in the early stages of writing this book. I am hyper aware of my skin, of how taking up space makes other people feel. I am hyper aware of my value, my worth– and my ability to love myself (and still critique my flaws) flutters through me still, but in a way that is productive and less harmful. I’m excited to continue working through the web of all that and hopefully share it with my readers soon. 

TT: Do you have any closing thoughts for your readers of the world?

IDS: I just hope you know that all of you is valid– your anger, your grief, your hunger, your desires. When the world asks you to shrink, makes you villain because making you so is easier than understanding you, seeing you, I hope you punch back. I hope you make them acknowledge you. I hope you learn to close your eyes when you kiss and find new joy. Take new chances. Write the shit that hurts. Whatever you do, just don’t stop. Don’t ever let go of your light.