Fell Hunger

Fell Hunger Synopsis

Fell Hunger, Joseph Lennon's first volume of poetry, gathers a body of work from twenty years of writing. The poems, most derived from the sonnet, reflect on living for many years with an undiagnosed illness, coeliac disease.

These reflections are interlaced with childhood memories and experiences of living in New York City, Ireland, Italy, and elsewhere. The voice of the poems often wrestles with dualities - pain and grace; home and away; violence and hope; sickness and health; religion and disillusionment; heritage and baggage. Seeking new resolutions, the poems then offer soft imperatives of harmony, endurance, and recovery.

"The poems of Joseph Lennon's debut collection, Fell Hunger, range warmly and ruefully across the scales of place and displacement - from the American heartland to the lost 'family country' of Ireland to Rapallo and Mumbai - and in so doing manage to turn the genre of bildungsroman into a transnational narrative of longing and witness."
Daniel Tobin

Joseph Lennon was born in Newport, Rhode Island, and grew up in central Illinois. He has lived in Ireland and Italy and travelled throughout India. He now lives in Philadelphia and is Director of Irish Studies at Villanova University. He has published poetry and critical essays on Irish literature and postcolonial studies: his book Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History (2004) won the Donald J. Murphy Prize for Distinguished First Book from the
American Conference for Irish Studies.