Hunger in Plain View by Ester Naomi Perquin and translated by David Colmer

This is poetry from Netherlands.

Hunger in Plain View by Ester Naomi Perquin translated by David Colmer is published by White Pine Press. This is a Book originally written in Dutch. This was published in 2017.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781945680052E12.

Hunger in Plain View, by Ester Naomi Perquin and translated by David Colmer, carries a title that feels almost too direct until one sits with it. Hunger here can be bodily, emotional, civic, or moral; plain view suggests not secrecy but the difficulty of noticing what is already before us. Perquin’s poems, at least as this English-language volume frames them, seem drawn toward vulnerability without making vulnerability decorative. I would read this book for its attention to social life: the self among others, the ordinary scene under ethical weather, the small want that turns out not to be small at all. Colmer’s translation keeps the poems clear enough to enter, but not so clear that they stop troubling the air around them.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.