These are poems of sacred monstrosity and “too much infinity,” where selves refuse erasure and emerge in exquisite multiplicity, unspooled across timelines and pleasure fields. A galaxy of kinships swells through these pages, whispering, howling, “what exceeds the catalogue of Discovery.”

Almost alone among writers making up bands to write about, when Flores puts the lyrics he’s made up on the page they read like something people would actually sing.

These poems are about nothing less than the very essence of earthly survival and they are delivered with a moving, heartbreaking, deft, powerful touch.

In The Hungering Years there is no such thing as an unworthy affection, nothing unworthy of close and careful attention, nothing unworthy of being pressed up against the undeserving world and becoming something greater.