The debut collection of poetry from one of the brightest new voices driving the American poetry scene. Deeply rooted in atmosphere, conservationist, humane, and utterly surprising, Reed Smith’s work challenges the notions of who we are and how we fit into our social and ecological environments.

From the Author: “The poems in Declarations of Hunger came out of a desire to return where I was born and grew up. I read recently that many debut books of poems are steeped in an author’s home, and mine is no different. Throughout the book are the self-similar fractals of the natural world built upon one another—the fields rising to the leaves that push into the clouds mirroring the creeks and hills of the farmland and river bottoms I spent so much time in.

If memory is hunger, there is starvation in every corner of the mind for what we remember we had. The poems of this book live inside that hunger to recollect and repossess. They scour a void I never want to fill, polishing the burnt memories of childhood, of family, of fear and of wonder.