Author Spotlight: Isabella DeSendi
- letraslatinasblog2
- Sep 15
- 7 min read
Buy: Someone Else’s Hunger by Isabella DeSendi | Four Way Books | September 15, 2025 | ISBN: 978-1-961897-58-8 | Pages: 120
What was your writing process? Your editing process? Did you adopt a unique process for this book, or do you have a “go-to” approach for all your writing?
I am a slow writer. The majority of the time, it takes me months (sometimes years!) to get to a place with a poem where I feel like I can release it. Usually, place and story come first– and then it’s about the consideration of music, of revelation. How can I interrupt myself? Challenge myself? Disrupt the form? What needs to be thought through more? What needs to be redacted to make another moment shine? When I finish a poem, I sit with it awhile and then read it aloud– and it’s only when the moment comes when I finally read it and think, “damn, that’s a poem” that I usually permit myself to stop tinkering with it and accept the piece for what it is.
How did your relationship with your family influence your writing?
How many words do we have left in this word count-ha! As my friends and readers know, I am very close with my family. My mom is a Cuban immigrant who came to America as a refugee and I have the immense privilege and responsibility of being first-born first-generation. My mom is my rock. She’s the toughest woman I know, and in her own way– also the most caring. Very rarely have I seen my mom cry. Very rarely does my mom accept help from others. From her, I learned how to have grit and resilience and hope– and I hope some of these things shine through the revelations in these poems.
When I started putting the poems together in a manuscript, it only dawned on me once the book was done that the thread needling all of this together was hunger– a kind of hunger (both spiritual and physical, internal and external) that I experienced, but also witnessed in the lives of the people I love. In realizing how our hunger was connected, even inherited, I was able to parse it, work through it, in order to understand it in a way that writing about it didn’t make me flinch.
And if the cover doesn’t give it away, many of my poems are fascinated by bodies and women– ancestral, mythological, iconic figures– and a lot of that has to do with the way I inherently idolize the women in my life: what their bodies have suffered, endured, but also enjoyed. When I feel lost, I look to the women in our stories who blazed new paths for us to walk through. In some of these poems, I investigate the lives of my abuela, my mom, but also Medusa, Eve, Mary– women I choose to see as a kind of extended family since their voices helped me speak when I couldn’t find the words to say the things that needed to be said. Their stories are not so different from mine or the women in my family. They gave me a blueprint for survival, for finding new ways to have hope.
But my book also investigates the lives and deaths of my tio and my cousin John– critiquing the ways that immigrants of all genders are villainized and become accustomed to shrinking, which can often lead to violence, and sometimes even death. In eulogizing them, I aim to share stories of Latin people who can relate to this kind of erasure.
Is there a connection to your past in your book? How did writing this book transform you?
It is no secret that this is a book that wrestles with difficult topics: disordered eating, sexual assault, racism, misogyny, otherness. Those are the things I witnessed and lived through. Those are the violences that haunt me into writing, even to this day. I said recently in another interview that I thought writing my way through all of this would heal me, and it did relieve my suffering, it did change me, but the watermark of those abuses– both by my own hand, and by the world– will stay with me forever. Writing doesn’t erase anything. In fact, writing brings us to the brink of ourselves by bringing into light and memorializing all truth, no matter how ugly that truth may be. It causes us to confront ourselves. I think what the writing did transform in me is the ability to admit what I have done, what others have done, what we are all doing to each other– and in that utterance feel less shameful about existing in the shadow of that violence. Writing these poems taught me that I could make something beautiful and worthy of my life, even the messy parts, and that has been lifesaving, a kind of simple redemption.
What is your current obsession? Short lines, slant rhymes, couplets, trees, etc.
Like most poets, I love a couplet. They feel complete, symmetrical, paired, sexy. But lately I’ve been loving tercets. They have more breath, provide more room to think and sing and turn. And I love the fullness of a tercet compared to a couplet, how much space they take up on the page.
Did another art form influence this work? Painting, music, dancing, etc.
There are a few ekphrastic poems in the book such as “Herodias Holding the Head of St. John the Baptist” and “Ars Poetica en el Museo del Prado.” I only realized after putting the book together that both of these paintings focus on the ecstasy of women. For Herodias, deliverance comes from taking power back from her abuser. For Danae, her pleasure is self-derived and is so impressive it arouses even the gods into witnessing and sharing in her pleasure. This kind of autonomy, of self-knowing and empowerment, is what I find mesmerizing, what I wanted to capture and explore in the poems. To know that even centuries ago, women were burdened by their lives and still sought ways to find liberation inspires me. Seeing these paintings in museums helped me put words to feelings and desires of my own. It helped me understand that all of our hungers are connected to our everyday lives, but also to the lives that came before us and the lives that will eventually come after us when we are long gone.
You can often tell a lot about a book by how it begins and how it ends. What is the first line and last line of your book?
“Once, while disemboweling the chicken readying it for my lover’s dinner, I remembered/my abuela slashing the rooster’s throat.”
“Nothing else/ but a blue sail on the water/ growing smaller in the distance.”
Outside of writing, what are some of your passions or hobbies?
Probably the most shocking hobby I have is that I am a competitive bodybuilder! Maybe this isn’t shocking based on how many poems are about the body, but I’m fascinated with what our bodies can do, the limitations they defy and break. I love learning about the machines that keep us kicking and exploring the way our relationship to the body can inform what our hearts and minds believe. The practice of bodybuilding is a lot like writing in that it’s a kind of artful war with the self focused on revision, on getting better. It’s a gift to get to be on a journey with one’s self, and both writing and bodybuilding force me to challenge the notions of what I believe I am capable of. They teach me about myself and often illuminate what I have survived, what I still need to untangle, and what I can make it through.
Do you have any advice for new and emerging writers? Is there anything you wish you knew?
Longevity. That’s the key. Get off social media and write! (This is advice for my today-old self as well.) I think it’s easy to fall into the trap of witnessing what other people are writing and publishing, and to feel the impossible pressure of the rat race upon us. When you choose to identify yourself as a writer, and believe that writing will happen when it must, when it needs to, in seasons, you liberate yourself from the pressure of making things just because you think you should on someone else’s arbitrary timeline. For me, that reminder is what’s kept me sane and free to explore. That’s what’s kept me curious.
Do you have a new project that you’re working on? Could you tell us a bit about it?
Right now I’m writing essays! The collection focuses mostly on strength training and fitness, the different kinds of sports I’ve been enthralled with, the way my body and spirit have changed as I’ve practiced each. In every modality, I’ve experienced hunger, had to unlearn and relearn what my body can withstand, what I can endure and move through. I’m excited to finish this work in hopes that it will flesh out what this book begins to investigate, which is the ways that we encounter the world through our bodies– and how ultimately, we can redeem old narratives if we are brave enough to suffer and survive the daily breaking.
Photo: Matt Haring
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 was published by Four Way Books. 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 2025 New Jersey Poetry Fellow, a finalist for the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and was included in the 2024 Best New Poets anthology, 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.
