Private Hunger<\/i>, Melody Lacina’s first collection of poetry, begins as a book of snapshots from a family album, becomes a carousel of colorslides from travels in Europe, and concludes as a gallery of poems celebrating the vitality of the body and its enormous appetite for life. Lacina is also a poet who can say, in the credo that opens the book,”I believe in the underside … the rhythm and off-rhyme of the ordinary.” If this is a book about passion and “private hunger” (“Food and sex. \/ What else matters? Words.”), it is also familiar with unsatisfied longings, losses, grief, and death, understanding how our desires sustain and torment us from childhood to the end.<\/p>\n
Lacina’s succinct poems lift anecdote to revelation, in spare lines, taut rhythms, and a voice that can register anything from anxiety to ecstasy. It may not be rare, in these times, to find a woman writing evocatively about sensual pleasures, but it is surely unusual to discover a poet who also has this much sense of balance and control, and such lively command of the common tongue.<\/p>\n