The Earth’s Tender Hunger- New and Selected Poems

In The Earth’s Tender Hunger, Spencer Sheehan-Kalina gathers new work alongside carefully chosen poems from earlier collections, creating a body of writing that listens as much as it speaks. This is a book shaped by return—return to the body, to the land, to the quiet urgencies that live beneath language.

Across these poems, hunger is not only desire, but a form of attention: the earth asking to be touched, the self asking to be known, love asking to be risked. Moving between tenderness and unrest, Sheehan-Kalina writes into the spaces where queerness, ecology, memory, and survival meet—where the personal becomes inseparable from the planetary.

The “new” poems extend this vision with a deepened clarity, while the “selected” work reveals the evolving roots of a voice committed to presence, care, and transformation. Together, they form a collection that is both intimate and expansive, grounded yet searching.

Lyrical, searching, and unafraid of vulnerability, The Earth’s Tender Hunger invites readers into a world where to feel deeply is a form of resistance—and where even the smallest act of noticing can become a way to begin again.