Ink & Ribbon Press · Limited Edition · Forthcoming

The Blessed Hungry

Poems by Jane Ann Fuller

Poetry Limited Edition Forthcoming

Poems of grief and appetite. A husband's ashes in a cardboard box. A girl kneeling in her father's orchard while the trees burn. A wren packing nests it will never use. Jane Ann Fuller writes about loss and hunger from southeastern Ohio, and she doesn't hurry either one.

Read Sample Poems About Jane

The Blessed Hungry by Jane Ann Fuller, book cover

“The work of grief is a hunger.”
from “Sin Eater”

“I believe every nothing leaves space worth tending.”
from “Ode to Nothing”

“How can I let them leave?”
from “Feeding the Birds in February”

The Book

The long after

The Blessed Hungry begins with a woman carrying her husband's ashes in a cardboard box through her neighborhood at night. It's so dark there's one blue light down the alley, and the bats and nightjars are her only company, flitting drunk around the lamplight. She's grieving, she's drinking, she's telling herself to get outside, walk, breathe. The book stays with her there a good while before it lets anyone say what comes next.

Jane Ann Fuller writes the long after. A wren packs and unpacks nest after nest it will never use. A girl kneels in her father's orchard while he sets the living trees on fire. A pair of steel-toed boots stands in a motel doorway without the man who wore them. A brother is gone nearly a year, a father is fed and bathed and turned in his bed as he dies, a mother in her late eighties says she doesn't care whether she lives, and none of them get tidied up for the page. A grackle on a suet cake, a bat trapped in the shower, a moose wading into a lake do some of the telling, and the poems follow all of it into kitchens and church basements and a house built after the old one burned, with a low, wide window so she can watch the yard.

Hunger runs under all of it, for the drink and for sleep and for someone's hands, and for peaches left to ripen in a paper sack, and a ten-dollar loaf of sourdough that was worth more. The title poem curses a cook for making everyone wait on the falafel and ends with a moose giving herself to a lake, and somewhere in the middle the curse turns into a blessing without anybody announcing it.

Content note: these poems deal with suicide, self-harm, addiction and recovery, and sexual violence.

Edition Details

TitleThe Blessed Hungry
AuthorJane Ann Fuller
GenrePoetry
PublisherInk & Ribbon Press
PublicationDate to be announced
FormatPaperback, limited edition
ISBNTBA
PriceTBA

Reading Room

Three poems from the manuscript.

Burning the Orchard

First appeared in I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing

A girl kneels in her father's orchard while he sets the trees on fire. Then the poem asks how a girl burns.

Wolverine Boots

First appeared as “Wolverines” in Triggerfish Critical Review

A honeymoon in a Kentucky motel, a husband who will weld rail for seventeen years, and a pair of boots left standing in the doorway.

The Blessed Hungry

First appeared as “Even the Blessed Are Hungry” in Silver Birch Press

The title poem. A curse on the cook who makes everyone wait, and a moose walking into a lake.

Recognition

A poet with a track record.

Prize James Boatwright III Poetry Prize

Grant Ohio Arts Council Special Projects Grant, for Revenants, A Story of Many Lives

First book Half-Life (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2021), a finalist for the National Indie Excellence Awards

Education MFA in poetry, University of Iowa Writers' Workshop

Poems from this book first appeared in Anacapa Review, Calyx, Hunger Mountain, One Art, Persimmon Tree, Sheila-Na-Gig Online, Trampoline, Triggerfish Critical Review, and many more

About the Author

Jane Ann Fuller

Jane Ann Fuller is a poet raised in rural Appalachia, in southeastern Ohio, where she still lives. Her first book, Half-Life, was published by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions in 2021. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and a BA in English from Ohio University's Honors Tutorial College.

She taught English at Hocking College and Ohio University, and in prisons, and served as poetry co-editor of Riverwind. She runs Meadowlark Lodge, a poetry and arts retreat in the Hocking Hills, and plays fiddle in the string band The Trophy Wives.

Elsewhere

A date is coming.

The Blessed Hungry was chosen from our 2026 open reading and will be published by Ink & Ribbon Press in a limited edition. Follow The Inkwell, the press's Substack, for the publication date, pre-order news, and events with Jane.

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When I was a girl, I held in my throat the dove’s somber coo before rain, knelt in the tall grass of my father’s orchard while he set fire to living trees — Yellow Transparent, thick with tent worms— this sacrifice would keep the rest from harm. We doused with gasoline the cuttings we had piled then lit and listened to them burn. The death cry climbed to such a pitch it disappeared like smoke into the stars. We poked at worms that writhed inside the charred cocoons. How does a girl burn? First she says good riddance to the junipers. To the clouds sitting in the trees like Buddhas. Black ants prick the cheeks of peonies. Then she razors her head smooth as nacre. Hair falls like ash and she breathes oneiric burning. She multiplies loss (father, mother, brother, sister) because the past is never finished. She will survive the truth by repeating it, grief her metronome. Embers of her climb like stars backward toward their constellations as if they know the way home.

They stood in the doorway without his feet in them, steel-toed, pocked with burns. Those boots kept him mostly safe from rogue sparks as he welded continuous rail from Louisa to Pikeville, Kentucky. No pretty place to live or work. We honeymooned there so he wouldn’t lose a week’s pay. I sat on the green chenille of the motel bed reading A Christmas Carol for the third time, the Ghost of Christmas Past pretending to matter to the future which is now the present, which I see drawn out in miles of rail he’d grind and weld for seventeen years. Meanwhile, I walked to the front desk for a Payday and a can of Diet Squirt. The woman in her faded housedress seemed genuine, nice, as if everything would work out, the solitude, the blatant, no-frills life. But the track said something different, that everyone eventually wants to be someplace else. A pair of boots stands in the corner, a life emptied, a shell to protect the spirit even though the spirit left. I understand why we name inanimate things for animals, my memory a creature who bares its fangs and works its rough tongue.

I curse you, Tía Sonia, scorcher of eggplant over the stove’s open flame, queen of char and crisp, chopped garlic, crushed parsley— curse you, fingerer of pomegranate seed boiled to molasses— the optional cucumber, the occasional cherry tomato—for making us wait. Curse your falafel, set to rest, rolled into walnut-sized nubs that brown to gold in roiling oil while the rest of us taste on air what you won’t let us touch with our tongues… we curse you who grind cardamom with pestle and mortar, you who strain the pannacotta, crush the rose petal to dust, to vagrant lips. We wait as the moon slowly enters the lake, as the moose follows the moon into the lake, as she holds among algae and spatterdock, head submerged, not to disturb the pink glaze of water that swallows her antlerless head, pulls her in to the shoulders as if she were kneeling. I see how she might want to kneel to give herself to the water to make of herself a meal for the lake.

The Blessed Hungry

The long after

Three poems from the manuscript.

Burning the Orchard

Wolverine Boots

The Blessed Hungry

A poet with a track record.

Jane Ann Fuller

More from Jane.

Jane's website

Half-Life on Goodreads

Interview with Roy Bentley

On Eyes of Some Robbers

A date is coming.