I first met Isabella DeSendi the way you meet certain people in this life—through the work. Her poems found me before she did, pulsing with a kind of fury that felt familiar. And when we finally connected, I knew I was speaking to someone who wasn’t afraid to walk with rage, to hold it close, to name it without apology. Bella has taught me what it means to excavate—how to dig through the wreckage of silence and say: this is where it hurts. She’s helped me look my own rage in the face and ask what it’s trying to teach me.
Reading Someone Else’s Hunger feels like listening to a survival album—one built track by track, poem by poem, stitched from scars and prayers. There’s an unflinching urgency in Isabella DeSendi’s voice: a clarity that doesn’t ask for permission. It testifies. In this intimate conversation, we talk about the music behind her poems, the women who gave her language, the violence of eradication, and the radical act of staying soft in a world that teaches you to disappear.
Darius Phelps: Reading Someone Else’s Hunger felt like listening to an album made by someone surviving—track by track, poem by poem—a kind of sacred testimony. What music was in your ears, in your body, as you wrote this book? And how did rhythm shape the voice of these poems?
Isabella DeSendi: Well first, I actually loved the album you sent me when we first connected (try not to think about it by JoJo)—it felt so aligned with the work. I’m actually curating a playlist for the launch of the book now, one that mirrors the movement and moods of the poems, like a score.
But when I was writing these, especially at the beginning—over a decade ago during my MFA—I was still in the thick of my eating disorder. I’d run alone along the Hudson River for miles and miles with these lyricless EDM tracks pounding in my ears. That bass became the pulse my body throbbed against, as I was still addicted to erasing my body, still grieving what had been taken from me after surviving sexual assault. Running gave me a strange sort of aliveness—it was euphoric. Destructive, yes, but liberating too. That sound, that beat— became a sort of lifeline; it carried me when I couldn’t carry myself.
DP: There’s such deep intimacy and rage in your work, especially in poems like “Milagros” and “Pep Talk for Medusa.” Who were the women, the artists, the stories that gave you permission to write with this kind of unapologetic fire?
ID: So many women are in this book—my abuela, my mother, Medusa, Eve, the Virgin Mary, Herodias, Danaë, Kali. They gave me a roadmap to speak what I wasn’t yet ready to name. I didn’t always have access to the language I needed, so I looked to their stories to teach me. Their experiences taught me that women have survived, are still surviving, the same violences across time. Writing through them gave me permission to say the thing it hurt to say. This book is for a lot of people—but it’s especially for women. I hope these poems carry someone else the way those women carried me.
DP: The speaker in Someone Else’s Hunger walks through trauma, myth, and desire, while still making room for softness—for wanting to be held, to dance, to heal. How do you stay tender when writing about such rupture?
ID: I stay tender by focusing on beauty—on what still holds value, what makes me excited to be alive. Beauty, to me, stands in opposition to violence. It’s a resistance. There’s a trope about Latinas being “too much”—too loud, too intense. And I too have been called “scary” just for asserting myself. But I’ve learned that it’s not my job to make people comfortable. It’s my job to be myself, to hold both that fire and tenderness. The more I step into my identity, the more softness and grace I allow myself. That’s a kind of healing too.
DP: That resonates. Especially after having COVID, I’ve had to relearn my body all over again. I’m still figuring out how to be tender with myself in the process. How do you navigate the tension between strength and softness—especially as someone who now does bodybuilding?
ID: Bodybuilding is the opposite of everything I once knew—it’s about being strong and taking up space. I used to obsess over shrinking myself, being fragile and invisible. Now I’m training in ways that feel feral, raw, powerful. And yet, I’m still an artist. So I’m constantly balancing those two poles— strength and sensitivity. It’s complex. But it’s been powerful to reframe strength as not just a physical state of stepping into, but an emotional one. Especially as BIPOC folks—we’ve been taught to hustle, to grind, to prove ourselves through exhaustion, through earning. That trauma lives in the body. But instead of working against it, I use it to help myself better— as I say in one of my poems “in the breaking I am bettering/ and in the bettering I am free.”
DP: Yes. For years I was addicted to walking and cardio—anything that would numb me or make me smaller. And yet now, I’m trying to learn the power of being strong, of gaining instead of losing. You’ve inspired me to return to that.
ID: That means so much to me. Truly. Our relationship to our bodies is so layered. I can’t say that the very drive that helped me survive has also caused harm. My obsession with achievement, with making, with proving myself worthy, comes from the drive abuela had and my mother has—immigrant women who had to fight for everything. That grit is a superpower, but it also takes a toll if we don’t learn to permit ourselves to rest. Now, I’m learning how to be strong without burning out, which is an important lesson for all artists and athletes to contend with.
DP: I love that. And I feel like this book isn’t just for us—it’s for the next generation. What do you hope Someone Else’s Hunger offers to young people of color who are trying to name their pain and power?
ID: My guiding light while writing this book was to make the book I wish I had at 15. After my assault, I was entering puberty, trying to understand sex, desire, shame—I had no roadmap. All I really had before me were the white dudes from the canon. No one handed me Audre Lorde or June Jordan until I was much older. I remember reading “Poem About My Rights” and just feeling it in my body. It gave me permission. I hope Someone Else’s Hunger does that for someone else. I hope it says: you’re not alone. Your rage is sacred. Yes, your grief is yours to hold, but it’s not yours to carry alone.
DP: That leads to my last question. When you think about legacy—what this book leaves behind—what do you want readers to remember most about your hunger?
ID: People think that once you write a book, your pain is resolved– but I laugh because that’s so far from the truth. My hunger is something I’ll wrestle with forever. Some seasons it devours me. Others, it disappears entirely. But I’ve learned to examine it—to ask where it comes from, what it’s trying to tell me. That inquiry, that reckoning—that’s the work. I hope readers remember that hunger can be a mirror. That it can be transformed. That it’s not just about surviving—but about naming, claiming, and finally becoming, learning to take up space and breathe.
Darius Phelps is a poet, educator, and scholar whose work explores grief, identity, and liberation through poetic inquiry. He is a Poetry Co-Editor at Matter, Associate Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, and the author of the forthcoming My God’s Been Silent.
Isabella DeSendi is a Latina poet and educator whose work has been published in POETRY, The Adroit Journal, Poetry Northwest and others. Her debut poetry collection titled “Someone Else’s Hunger” will be published by Four Way Books in 2025. Her chapbook, Through the New Body won the Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship and was published in 2020. Recently, she has been named a New Jersey poetry Fellow, was included in the 2024 Best New Poets anthology, and has been named a finalist for the Ruth Lilly Fellowship and Rattle’s $15,000 Poetry Prize among other awards. Isabella has attended Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop, the Storyknife Writers’ Residency in Alaska, and holds an MFA from Columbia University. She currently lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.