Ready to Answer With Hunger Coming Soon!
C&R Press Poetry Prize Awardee 2024
ABOUT
Ready to Answer With Hunger is an honest look at motherhood, gender, grief, loss of faith, and living inside an aging body. Set in both a real western landscape and a surreal one that travels as close as the ribs of our mothers and as far as the surface of the moon, it reads at times as memoir and other times as dream.
PRAISE FOR READY TO ANSWER WITH HUNGER
“These are poems of Wyoming and girlhood and shiny boots and a God who ‘was good / for lots of things,’ as you’ve never heard them before: full of “all the tangle / and wild” of queer desire, of exorcisms, of motherhood and children who “bit off the tongues / of their mothers,” and of ghost fathers with their arms full of antiques. When Stacy Boe Miller writes, ‘I want you to live here / with me. Maybe you already do. I guess I want you to say it,’ I am overjoyed to answer yes. These are full-hearted, full-voiced, necessary poems that are gritty and funny and fearless in what they both ask and offer. I’m so grateful we all get to live awhile in and with her voice.”
–Alexandra Teague, author of [ominous music intensifying]
“The power of Ready to Answer with Hunger is its firm refusal to erect social, poetic, and personal divisions between joy, sorrow, lust, guilt, violence, daily pleasure, deep intimacy, or considerations of the sacred. Everything in Stacy Boe Miller’s world is seen and attested to with nuance and meaning, from suicide and religious extremism to the most common and meaningful acts a day might bring, whether that’s combing a child’s hair or throwing on a set of snow chains in a neglected corner of America. The poems here are built from materials that last, and we have before us a new and thrilling voice.”
–Michael McGriff, author of Inquest and Angel Sharpening its Beak
“An essential wisdom lives in Auden’s quip, that poetry is ‘the clear expression of mixed feelings.’ It is wisdom in regards to poetry but to life as well: we want what we want even when we don’t have a clear idea what it is we desire. Stacy Boe Miller’s poems are a life’s story about that place, that nexus, the self in a world of abundance and deprivation, despair and joy, fulfillment and vacancy. Ready to Answer with Hunger is not a map but a landscape spread out before us, full of mountains, birds, and rivers, and it’s walked by a woman who has spent a life wondering ‘what we were hoping for,’ and almost believing there’s ‘a line we would draw if we had any / power to draw that kind of line.’ It’s a walk you should take with her, full of histories, beauties, and revelations. Stacy Boe Miller has that power.”
–Robert Wrigley