Eat Or We Both Starve

Book excerpt: 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.'