Eat Or We Both Starve

Victoria Kennefick

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781800170704
• eBook ISBN: 9781800170711
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

Winner of the Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize 2022

Awarded the Emerging Writer of the Year in the Dalkey Literary Awards 2022

Shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry 2022

Shortlisted for the Butler Literary Prize 2022

Shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award 2021

Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2021

An Irish Times Best Poetry Books of 2021

A Guardian Book of the Year 2021

A White Review Book of the Year 2021

A Sunday Independent (Dublin) Book of the Year 2021

A Telegraph Best New Poetry Books for Christmas 2021

Victoria Kennefick's daring first book, Eat or We Both Starve, draws readers into seemingly recognisable set-pieces - the family home, the shared meal, the rituals of historical occasions, desire - but Kennefick forges this material into new shapes, making them viable again for exploring what it is to live with the past - and not to be consumed by it.

Rebecca Goss writes: 'Victoria Kennefick writes with a fresh urgency, giving us poems that are honest and fearless. She once said: "Poetry has saved my life, made my life. Reading and writing it have taught me bravery and discipline." Kennefick is unafraid to explore bereavement, sex and the female body in her poetry. She writes with a visceral originality. Her poems are rich with physical sensations. She is able to find beauty in the big subjects like sorrow and desire, offering us the finest, most startling details. Her identity as a young Irish woman is hugely important to her, something she explores with intelligence and candour. I have always felt there is nothing Victoria could not tackle. The scope in her work is exhilarating.'

26

SECOND FAMILY

i. Widowers don’t stay that way for long

It is like this
		wedding dresses over
brides’ heads, born-again
		hands reaching through
silk and lace, another woman’s
		children ready-made waiting.
Two brides, four brides
		lit like lanterns float up the aisle
toward grooms. The same men.
		My grandfather, my father
hold the same hands.
		Again. First wives, delicate,
wilt like flowers in late summer,
		storybook wives their long hair
disappears, curling in
		and out of photographs.
My family matrimony squared.
		My grandmother a second. My mother
too. Rearranging pieces,
		the pattern ill-fitting. So much
white. Their veils slip again.
		Again. Again.

27

ii. The wicked stepmother is my (m)other is me

What if I were to tell you my mother

stepped into that space

left by another, like her mother

before her, like a question mark, curved

like that. Am I wicked too,

nasty half-sister with grabby hands?

I cracked the glass slipper,

I didn’t mean to (though I am

always stealing; I squander

my life like coins.) Our maternal line

starving (we still eat apples,

we are immune).

I never heard my father

say her name. I wrote it down instead,

swallowed the paper like a host. Even now,

I flinch if I hear it on the radio, read it in a book,

meet someone with it on them

like a wine stain. I love her because

I am here. My hands should ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Learning to Eat my Mother, where my Mother is the Teacher
• (M)eat
• A Young Girl Considers Her Reflection
• Corpus Christi Procession
• Swing
• Swimming Lesson
• Hunger Strikes Catherine of Siena (1347–1380)
• Choke
• Second Communion
• Forty Days
• Doll Game
• Beached Whale
• Lighthouse
• Hunger Strikes Angela of Foligno (1248–1309)
• Second Family
• Alternative Medicine
• Cure For Anaemia
• Count Ugolino or History’s Vaguest Cannibal
• Selfie
• Hunger Strikes Veronica Giuliani (1660–1727)
• Researching the Irish Famine
• Cork Schoolgirl Considers the GPO, Dublin 2016
• The Talk
• Big Girl
• Supper
• What it Would be Like to Eat a Girl
• The Preacher’s Daughter
• In Memory of Mary Tyler Moore
• Hunger Strikes Columba of Rieti (1467–1501)
• Diet
• Arctic Circle
• January
• Rib
• I Didn’t Know What to Do With Myself
• A Young Girl Considers her Grandmother, Ballinamona Co. Cork 1921
• Pythagoreans
• Hunger Strikes Gemma Galgani (1878–1903)
• Paris Syndrome
• Burn Baby, Burn
• Moby-Dick
• On the Publication of Les Terres du Ciel (1884)
• Smell Dating
• In Heptonstall
• How to Skin a Dogfish
• Hunger Strikes Victoria Kennefick
• Family Planning
• Intercession to St. Anthony
• Guest Room
• Á La Carte
• Open Your Mouth
• Prayer to Audrey Hepburn
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Copyright