The Hunger Wall: Poems

by James Ragan

Book Overview

In 1992, critically acclaimed poet James Ragan was in Los Angeles when riots exploded across racial and class lines. That same year he was also living in Prague when Czechoslovakia divided into two separate nations, motivated by the principles of "nationalism." This odd coincidence forms the crux of his new, eagerly anticipated book of poetry. The poems in The Hunger Wall, named for a wall near the Prague Castle, take these two cultural sensibilities...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802134785
• ISBN13: 9780802134783
• Release Date: August 1996
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 112 Pages
• Weight: 0.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Hunger That Satisfies

A deeply unsettling yet elegiac collection in symphonic form that explores concentric locations and the sense each have within the author, the reader, and the metaphysical space between both. A personal template for the poetic condition and ambitions therein. Ragan's wide travels and world-class accomplishments as a professor of letters are richly, lovingly documented here. Ratner's review is astonishingly obtuse in the matter of what constitutes 'poetry,' a brush-off as inaccurate as it is absurd

"The Hunger Wall" by James Ragan

The poems in James Ragan's "The Hunger Wall" are reflective, mixing conscious memory with unconscious imagination. No other poet has so profoundly described the widening abyss between the rich and the poor that prompted both the 1992 Los Angeles riots (unfortunately mistaken by some with the 1965 Watts riots) and the split that occurred six months later between Slovakia and the Czech Republic. The various forms of oppression captured by Ragan's astute personal observations are deftly recreated by one who has been there. These poems are dry ice smoking from contact. Ragan chronicles the near-fatal death of the soul and its ultimate emergence.