Humans
- Caits Meissner (author, artist)
- Elæ Moss (artist)
ISBN
0-9860505-8-9
978-0-9860505-8-9
Page count
156
Keywords
Poetry, Prose, Illustration, Illustrations, Art, Comic, Comics, Drawings, Notes, Essay, Essays, Lesson Plans, Lessons, Hybrid, Gender, Women
Publication date
2016
Language(s)
English
Publication media type
Print Document
Hybrid
Course Materials
Publication series
Unlimited Editions
Let It Die Hungry
Contrary to the book’s title, LET IT DIE HUNGRY is a collection of poems bursting with life. Recklessly sensual, provocative and profoundly curious, Meissner’s coming-of-age poems seek to anchor their place in a messy world, blurring the edges of hard borders and disparate identities. Finding joy, connection and determination in desperate spaces, as well as the slippery terrain of a changing self, Meissner’s voice is at once a reckoning, a proclamation, and an open question. Sprinkled with the author’s illustrations, the book’s multidisciplinary approach also includes lesson plans, originally utilized in a women’s prison, that invite the reader to write their own way out of polarizing dichotomies and into the vast grey space of what it means to be alive.
“Caits Meissner’s LET IT DIE HUNGRY is a stunningly potent archive of surviving. In poems, drawings, notes, and workbook-style experiments, Meissner generously shares her tools of becoming while simultaneously reinventing what a book of poems might be. In each of these modes it is clear: Meissner believes in the powers of seeing, testifying, and saying what is most difficult. Running through the blood of this book I hear Audre Lorde’s charge in The Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action: ‘Your silence will not protect you.’ From lyric narratives to achingly lucid prose, this book is ardor-medicine against oblivion. These poems ‘[spill] past the heart’s armor.'” — Aracelis Girmay
“Caits Meissner’s LET IT DIE HUNGRY deals with the difficulty of the body, the ‘human robe’ (as she aptly calls it) that hinders and endangers the soul beneath. It’s an intense book at time violent and vulnerable a dangerous but brave place for readers, filled with dreams, fantasy, nightmare, all mixed-in with stark reality. These poems are human and wise, and in the writing prompts, the reader is helped along in the struggle to better understand herself. This is a wildly exciting debut book.” — Bianca Stone
“In this collection dedicated to the women poets of Afghanistan that concludes with a poem for the women poets at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, Caits Meissner writes with great urgency of lives and landscapes scarred by conflict and pain. But even as her rangy, associative poems take us into terrain of turmoil, her compassion for her subjects offers the possibility of reconciliation through the very recognition that poems provide.” — David Groff
About the Contributor(s)
Caits Meissner is the author of the illustrated hybrid poetry book Let It Die Hungry (The Operating System, 2016). Her latest projects include the DIY comix poetry zine Pep Talks For Broke(n) People and a comix vignette series, New York Strange, publishing monthly in Hobart journal throughout 2020. She currently is the inaugural Palette Poetry Second Book Fellow and spends her days as the Prison and Justice Writing Program Director at PEN America.
Caits Meissner’s previous book, The Letter All Your Friends Have Written You, was co-written with Tishon Woolcock (2012, Well&Often.) Her work has been awarded first place prizes from the Pan-African Literary Forum’s OneWorld Fellowship, the Jan-Ai Scholarship Fund, and City College’s The Jerome Lowell DeJur Prize in Poetry. Caits’s poems are published in numerous journals and anthologies, including Drunken Boat, The Literary Review, Split This Rock Poem of the Week, Adroit, Public Pool, The Feminist Wire and The Offing. In 2010 her album, the wolf & me, was released to accolades on platforms such as Okayplayer. “Fresh, honest and loving,” Erykah Badu called Caits’ blend of poetry and music, naming her “a delicate heart like mine.” For over 15 years, Caits has facilitated innovative arts programs and co-created across a wide spectrum of organizations and communities, with a special focus on spaces of incarceration, women, and youth. She currently serves as Writer-in-Residence at Bronx Academy of Letters, where she is piloting a creative writing exchange between free and incarcerated young people, and is part-time faculty at CUNY and The New School University. She is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at The City College of New York.
Elæ Moss is a multimodal artist-researcher, curator, designer, and educator. Seeking Speculative Solidarities, they employ analog and digital media to investigate human, institutional and ecological systems and to iterate open source strategies for ecological and social change. Recent projects have shown at La Mama Galleria, EFA Project Space, STWST/Ars Electronica, Usdan Gallery, Judson Church, the Segal Center, SOHO20, Dixon Place, and the Exponential Festival, among others. Select publications include Big Echo, Tagvverk, Vestiges, Matters of Feminist Practice, The Transgender Narratives Anthology, Choice Words: Writers on Abortion, The Brooklyn Poets Anthology, and Resist Much, Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance. Books include Ground, Blood Altas, Overview Effect, Sweet and Low: Indefinite Singular, Bodies of Work, and The Precarity Bodyhacking Work-Book and Guide. Moss is a Professor at Pratt Institute, and the developer / founder of the Operating System + Liminal Lab. More at: https://onlywhatican.net and https://theoperatingsystem.org.
