Hungry

Wry and searching, wise and playful, Daniel Karasik’s poetic voice is singular, the voice of an old soul navigating contemporary straits. Witty delight and precocious insight commingle in refreshingly accessible poems whose thrust is philosophical even when the poet is at his most irreverent.

What is a life worth living, many of these poems ask. How can love express itself authentically? How can one live and work in a way that’s dignified, humane?

The answers, implied or overt, are as unexpected as they are thoughtful. Hungry, Karasik’s first collection of poetry, is an introduction to one of the bright literary lights of his generation.

“In Hungry, the acclaimed playwright Daniel Karasik condenses his knowledge of character and situation into poems that get at the essential drama of the human. His poetry is penetrating yet warm in both vision and language: beautifully measured in both senses of the word. The title poem is as fine as any sonnet to come out of the recent revival of that form…and there is similar achievement on every page.”
– A. F. Moritz

“Daniel Karasik lays out an ambitious spread. Hungry is a feast—a table piled high with sushi restaurants and Greyhound buses, locker rooms and microscopes… Underpinning the collection’s hunt for fulfillment is Karasik’s well-intuited sense of structure. Hungry is salted with traditional forms – a villanelle about elevator doors, a Petrarchan sonnet about an MRI. The work is dense with repetition, the poems kneading something new from something old… But what gives Karasik’s debut its teeth is the wonder that spills from its pages. The collection is replete with flash moments of insight.”
– ARC Poetry Magazine