I'm Hungry. A Novel

From Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich, a novel about the collisions of youth-with want, with art, with rage-as experienced by a young Chippewa writer in politically fraught 1970s America."Where do we find a definition? Where do we find what a poet is?"Fargo, 1971. Erdrich's narrator spends her days sneaking pocketsful of lasagna home from waitressing, missing the author friends who have floated out of town again, and wondering half-seriously if the poetry of local third graders is outdoing her own.
In search of more life, more inspiration, and-always-enough food to get through the next day, she embarks on a series of jobs, affairs, and travels that illuminate the wild eccentricities of the American national character as much as they do the injustices-and resistances-boiling around her in North Dakota. I'm Hungry explores shocking violence, unearthly beauty, and voracious appetites of all kinds, from sexual hunger to the need for a life transfigured by poetry.
It answers the question of "what a poet is" with an indelible portrait of a young woman in a fractured community who finds her voice even as she encounters lovers, hustlers, and specters whose own hungers threaten to pull her under. A bold, gorgeously textured, and unforgettable moral fable, this compelling novel will be revelatory to her legions of fans.