Two rivers course through Ruth Goring’s poems: a cold river of hunger, a shimmering river of joy. The reader rides these deep waters with the poet, encountering a world whose hunger carries holiness. On a city bus, recorded announcements become a liturgy; the poet walks in snowfall and hears spirits whispering from the ground; late-night jazz improvisation transmutes to ecstatic church. Goring is a world citizen, attentive to hunger for justice among families of the disappeared in Colombia, doctors in Syria, West Bank teenagers. The English language with all its riches is insufficient for this hunger, and so Spanish tumbles onto the page from time to time, sometimes in entire poems with elegant translations.
The Authority of Hunger opens up a ravine of vulnerability, “the murk / born in me,” trusting the reader as a companion and fellow pilgrim. We enter an intimacy both public and private: love, neocolonialism, racism, personal violations, loneliness, unbearable family stories, forgiveness, mending. In this “physical humidity of thought,” Goring’s words become garments for our own grief, bread to assuage our hunger.
Ruth Goring’s new collection, The Authority of Hunger, is luminous. In fiercely tender lyric firmly located in place-from Bogotá to Kansas City, Chicago to Aleppo-it limns family legacies, juxtaposed migrations, generations of marriage and motherhood, and the haunting accountabilities of a global age. Insistently attentive to the real, these poems bear witness to violence and grief, even as they voice a boundless yearning for goodness as both sensory delight and public justice. Embracing a capacious range of human feeling, always grounded in the body and its world, they trace the intersecting flows of rivers and blood vessels, climate catastrophe and shared faith, political grief and everyday gifts: trees, spices, kindness, song. This book reminds us of what poetry is for: it sings the truth of our faltering and our flight, refusing the tired separation of personal and political, radiant in its compassion and beautiful in its urgency.
Cynthia R. Wallace, author of The Literary Afterlives of Simone Weil and Of Women Borne
Ruth Goring’s collection, The Authority of Hunger, is a rich interweaving of lives and experiences lit with color and wonder. Ruth’s refreshingly alert curiosity sets into motion a kaleidoscope of languages, rhythms, sights, sounds, aromas, lands, and landscapes that call the reader to slow down, to see. An intuitive wisdom lies within the presence of these poems. These poems evoke the difficult and joyous, the grief and the beauty of what it means to grow through the years while never losing one’s hunger to learn.
Andrea Witzke Slot, author of The Ministry of Flowers and To Find a New Beauty
With such care and elegance, in both English and Spanish, Goring bears witness to the destruction that ravages the lives of peoples who are marginalized and silenced, while celebrating their noble resistance, their emboldened voices, their dedication to their communities, their epic survival. The poet’s heart in The Authority of Hunger bleeds for a more compassionate, more peaceful, more just world for all of us-and these poems say, “Listen, aquí estamos,” alive together on “this earth / that keeps forgiving and offering / its fragrances.”
Faisal Mohyuddin, author of Elsewhere: An Elegy and The Displaced Children of Displaced Children
In The Authority of Hunger, Ruth Goring creates a tapestry that wraps around the world, its threads drawing on what is both fundamentally unique and universally human. “You wanted to earn your life / two languages ago,” she writes, capturing how the book’s bilingual and international stories emerge. Amid the joy of interconnectedness, there lurks the sorrow of humanity’s incessant wars and losses: “We found old songs and sang them, / told stories and painted, we chanted and wept / in the streets, made way for each other.” Even as the speakers in the poems speak of social protest and deep empathy in action, Goring’s poems confront her own cultural heritage and how it links her to colonialism, war, violence. The result is a book that squarely faces the shame of complicity while affirming that, in spite of it all, we can build a better future.
Jessica Walsh, author of Blowdown and Book of Gods and Grudges
Ruth Goring’s
earlier poetry collections are Soap Is Political (2015) and Yellow Doors (2003); she has also written Dearworthy: Little Meditations on the Revelations of Julian of Norwich (2024) and several children’s picture books. With photographer Michael Bracey, she authored Caras lindas de Colombia / Beautiful Faces of Colombia (2018), a bilingual celebration of Afro-Colombian communities. Brought up in Colombia and now rooted in Chicago, she also makes visual art, gardens with native plants, and does solidarity work. Find her at ruthgoringbooks.com.