Jane Eaton Hamilton

“I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe. I buried the girl I was because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. . . . I was trapped in my body, one that I barely recognized or understood, but at least I was safe.” In her phenomenally popular essays and long-running Tumblr blog, Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and body, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. As a woman who describes her own body as “wildly undisciplined,” Roxane understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care. In Hunger, she explores her past—including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning point in her young life—and brings readers along on her journey to understand and ultimately save herself. With the bracing candor, vulnerability, and power that have made her one of the most admired writers of her generation, Roxane explores what it means to learn to take care of yourself: how to feed your hungers for delicious and satisfying food, a smaller and safer body, and a body that can love and be loved—in a time when the bigger you are, the smaller your world becomes.

Steam-Cleaning Love, J. A. Hamilton's second book of poetry revives the angry, biting, funny, loving, randy voice that won readers for Body Rain (1991). Women and women's bodies remain central; Hamilton's passion for both stirs her language to a visceral music of heart, breast and bone. But Hamilton's anger, still palpable, now occupies a more celebratory space. In these poems, grained with betrayal, loneliness, fear and hesitation, love is a strange, unwieldy and thoroughly marvelous creature; its songs are oh-la-light-hearted as often as they are blue. Wistful and wild, silly and sensuous, here is another argument in Hamilton's deep heart logic.

from the cover: Body Rain is--flower and thorn--a book of mothers and daughters; of sons become predators and victims; of violation and nurturing. In J. A. Hamilton's poems blood is red, black hearts are black. There is no flinching from things as bad as they can be--especially, but not only, for women. And yet, this passionate powerful writing radiates affirmation. 'The force of the living' is felt everywhere in the deep heart logic, in the music of surprise, of the language of Body Rain. "J. A. Hamilton (Jane Eaton Hamilton) is not a poet content to whisper in your ear or take you on slow walks through pretty fields. She sits you down in her hardest chair, litters tacks on the floor about your naked feet, and holds you there petrified but alert as she speaks the body's news." -Leon Rooke