A Reminder of Hunger and Wings by Jane Ebihara

Jane Ebihara’s A Reminder of Hunger and Wings begins in childhood with “her first memory/this one/of quiet rebellion.”  The poems that follow detail a journey through time and loss. They speak to hope, and they reckon with grief. These poems are deftly crafted with meticulous attention to line, image, and sound. Compressed and compelling, filled with metaphor and meaning, they reflect the richness of an examined and realized life. Ebihara creates for her readers (as the spider in her poem “The Poet Watches a Spider” does) a profound and compelling sense of “wonder from want.”

–Adele Kenney, Poetry Editor, Tiferet Journal

The poems in A Reminder of Hunger and Wings convey stillness, as in the quietude of nature, but they also whisper “still” as in persistence. Ebihara’s poems remind us that all light may be “a slice of winter light,” that “morning comes anyway” even though “sometimes this/is how/a love poem/ends.” But what persists most urgently is Ebihara’s voice reminding us that sometimes poems, like dreams, “simply point/to the place where a path/used to be.”

–RG Evans, author of The Holy Both

In A Reminder of Hunger and Wings, Ebihara’s poems draw us into their quiet beauty, their subtle music, and their deftly rendered imagery. Like the November gardener “whose fingers move/light as wingbeats” in a “search for beauty now spent,” these poems capture the poignancy of grief, memory, and the courage to” “free the now brittle bloom”.

 —Priscilla Orr, author of Losing the Horizon