In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
The poems in Isabella DeSendi’s collection Someone Else’s Hunger are a visceral response to sexual assault, racism, and misogyny while also celebrating opportunities for personal deliverance.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“In her blistering debut, DeSendi turns an unflinching eye on the experience of surviving sexual assault, as well as the patriarchal and nativist systemic violence that victimizes women and members of racialized communities in the United States.”
In her own words, here is Isabella DeSendi’s Book Notes music playlist for her poetry collection Someone Else’s Hunger:
This playlist is a score for Someone Else’s Hunger, tracking the speaker’s journey from a place of violence and self-abandonment to empowerment and reclamation– a universe which includes the possibility of love, self-acceptance, and joy. There are ballads, Latin tunes, jazz tracks, Afrobeats– the accumulation of which is meant to signify the speaker’s transition through 10 years of self-reckoning. I hope after listening and reading, you feel carried and empowered having withstood whatever storms swept you away. Cry, dance, sing– all of it is necessary.
Chan Chan – Buena Vista Social Club
It’s impossible for me to begin this playlist with anything other than this track whose simple melody and guitar riffs capture the beauty and sadness of Havana, written by Compay Segundo in 1984. When asked what the genesis of the song was, Segundo replied, “I didn’t compose Chan Chan, I dreamt it. I dream of music…One day I woke up hearing those four sensitive notes. I gave them a lyric inspired by a children’s tale from my childhood, Juanica y Chan Chan, and you see, now it’s sung everywhere.”
This song is sister to the opening poem of my book, “Once, While Disemboweling the Chicken” which is an investigation of my relationship with violence and a mythologization of my family and the practices we brought over from Cuba. For years I had the music of this poem playing in my head, but couldn’t figure out how to organize the story, connect the different trauma dots. When it finally clicked, the poem opened its doors. I realized I couldn’t tell my story without also leaning on the story of my ancestors to help light a way. This song is a reminder that their music and stories live in us, and so often we can lean on their words and stories for direction, to help guide us through.
Hard Out Here – Raye
Raye’s voice and breadth is incredible– jazz, pop, opera– this artist can truly do it all. In this track, I love the mix of her jazzy rasp, the bop of the bass sliding under her croon.
The song opens with, “After years and fears and smiling through my tears/ All I ask of you is open your ears/ ‘Cause the truth ain’t pretty my dear/ It’s been dark, been hard out–
This is a song about how difficult it is to exist as a woman in a world flooded with “all the white men CEOs” who aim to make us the subjects of their power. It’s a riff on how often masculinity pervades and asserts itself on women– a theme I meditate on early in the book with the poem “Un Poema Para Latinas.” I love the defiance and the reassurance Raye makes, claiming, “See how I flow when I’m in pain, I’m going to pray for you/Then I’m going to aim for you, and it’s a shame for you/shame for you.” These final lines are a mantra for Someone Else’s Hunger which explores the journey toward forgiveness while never abandoning the call for conviction and retribution.
My Mind – Yebba
Oh my God, Yebba’s voice! I first found her a decade ago when I discovered her track “Smoke” on Youtube. In my mind, this song is redolent of the same musings “Hippocampus” wrestles with. What does it mean to be haunted to the point of losing one’s mind? One of the most incredible features of Yebba’s voice is the way she’s able to transition seamlessly from her chest voice to her head voice. In each phrase, there is room for both the guttural cry and the soft whisper shame makes. I think this range is similar to something that exists in the voice of my speaker, in all women– when confronted with pain. Sometimes our cry is a scream and also a song– violent and beautiful, capable of reaching both the heavens and the dead.
Spirit Cold – Tall Heights
“Oh, this my trash, this my tome/ Oh, this my blood, this my bone” laments the singer in the chorus of this track. I like to think of this one accompanying “Ode to Anorexia in Spring” when I was tired of having a body and deep in the throes of my battle with anorexia and bulimia. Like the question this song poses, “How do I wake my spirit cold?” so I too was seeking a way to wake up, shake the snow from my bones, step into spring fully invigorated.
Autumn in New York – Billie Holiday
So much of the middle of this book is an homage to New York and all the people who swept me up in their chaos, our chaos, and whose zany brilliance taught me about being a woman and an artist in a city that will stand on top of you if you don’t stand on top of it. Truthfully, I could’ve picked any standard by Coltrane or Charlie or Dizzie or any of the titans, but Billie’s voice just has a way of getting under your skin. This song makes me think of all the times I walked through Central Park, or along the West Side Highway, scribbling lines of poetry in my journal, trying to make sense of the puzzle that was my world. Jazz was the soundtrack to the years when I first became a lover and subsequently fell in love with New York. Moving here from Florida, I had never seen snow or experienced autumn. In many ways, I was shedding old leaves, growing new buds, all while opening up to the new idea of womanhood I was finding the courage to step into.
Little Girl Gone – Chinchilla
Much like Raye’s track, this one is a brute reclamation of power by a woman who has been hurt by a man. The braggadoccio, the break out into the chorus, the simple inditement, “You’re so fucking stupid”– it’s so explosive that it’s hard to not feel swept up in this song’s anthemic swell. Not only does Chinchilla make her perpetrator feel small as she once felt, she breaks through those old self tropes, singing “Honey, I’ve changed so much since I last saw you.” This battlecry is one my speaker attempts to embody as the book progresses, daring her perpetrators to step to her in her new armor as she marks herself ready, unflinching, ready for the fight.
Contra Todo – iLe
iLe’s album Almadura takes its title from a play on words– “armadura” which means “armor” in Spanish and “alma dura” which means strong soul. iLe claims “almadura” is meant to reference the courage the heart must hold onto in order to survive the world. “Contra Todo” (Against Everything) could also be the anthem of this book, which is a call to any person who has suffered or been displaced, had to search for a way out of the desert so that they might find a safe place to drink again, pull water to their lips. You will feel the percussive line of this song beat inside your bones, and because of that, it’s hard not to feel empowered when listening to it– like you can endure the heavy rains that pound while marching beside its bassline. Much of the percussive drive in Latin music draws on its indigenous and African roots, which brought the drumline and rhythm into our repertoire. When I listen to this song, I feel the blood of my ancestors rushing through me like a drum. This song marks the speaker’s reentry into a world where she finally believes herself warrior, ready to take on her life headstrong.
Anybody – Burna Boy
If “Contra Todo” begins the process of reclamation, “Anybody” is the track that helps bring this new body into its season of reclamation. This song is the track I was dancing to in “Milagros” when the speaker uses dance to help re-meet her body. When I dance to Afrobeats, I feel uninhibited, free, possessed only by the buoy of my hips acting as an anchor, a lifeline that reminds me I am tethered to this Earth, this singular life. By imagining how her ancestors might’ve moved in Havana, the speaker in this poem is able to inspire herself into liberation– and this song is a reflection of the way movement helped me free myself from the shackles of my body. When I listen to it, I can’t help but move and in that movement, feel free.
Moment 4 Life – Nicki Minaj
The first verse of this song is the embodiment of all the lessons the speaker has learned in wrestling with the chains of entrapment evoked in these poems. Nicki is a lyric master– her flow, her wordplay, the sincerity in her voice as she reflects on vindication– this is the prayer my speaker aims to exalt by the end of this book. Whether she’s at the gym, at the poetry reading in Brooklyn, in Buffalo where she realizes fear is an integral part of growth, she comes to understand that all of her trials led her here: on the page with the reader. Like Nicki says, this moment is the point of all of it. And the violin that sneaks in? It’s true and gorgeous and grounding. It softens the force Nicki comes through ablaze with proving it is possible to be both tender and strong.
Ameriican Requiem – Beyonce
This song is a critique of America, of the limiting beliefs that can cuff one to old narratives of self. In this track, Beyonce asks the listener if they see her, if they hear her, if they are willing to stand beside her and take up space. “Now is the time to face the wind,” she claims. In the final poem of my collection, the speaker maps her journey, admits her faults and flaws, and yet, is still able to stand by the water and face the wind, acknowledge the bewildering beauty that living offers. As Beyonce calls on her ancestors, her country roots, so does the speaker look to her mother’s audacious move to America in search of something new. This beckoning, this looking out toward the future, isn’t an ending, but the indication of a new beginning, a new starting point to ask more questions, to continue questioning and growing. The harmonies, the choral chant– all of it is a way for Beyonce to join her voice with her community. I’d like to think this is what my book aims to do. If a reader has made it to this point, my simple hope is that they feel less alone, emboldened to ask the world to see them, reconsider them in a new way, and face whatever lion scratches at their back. Now is the time to face the wind. Now is the time to stand up and sing and try again.
Isabella DeSendi is a Latina poet and educator whose work has been published in POETRY, The Adroit Journal, Poetry Northwest, and others. 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 New Jersey Poetry Fellow, was included in the 2024 Best New Poets anthology, and has been named a finalist for the Ruth Lilly Fellowship and Rattle’s $15,000 Poetry Prize, 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.