Comes with Road Trip Playlist + Driving Scavenger Hunt (delivered to your email with purchase of book)

“May you stay feral and hungry.” For those who know what happens when the witching hour casts its pall through pale windows, calling the creatures of the wild to leap in the shadows of your room, this is a prayer. Your prayer. And Shane Manier has written it, in all of its fierce hunger and many tongues. From the shadow of a wolf worn by a father, to the wet dog insomnia plaguing the narrator, Manier knows that the heart is a beast of its own making and the poems in this collection howl with the need to feel the road unwind beneath its feet, breathless and fervent with wild abandon. Open the cover. Take this journey. You will feel the wind lay your hair back and you will learn to speak moonlight with a thirsty tongue.

~ Zachary Kluckman, Founder of MindWell Poetry, author of Some of It is Muscle and Rearview Funhouse

Shane Manier has written a poetic playlist for a road trip filled with so much colorful imagery, hope, and raw honesty. This book continues the character of vulnerability that Manier is known for. Never backing down from showing the broken parts of her human experience but also taking time to show the reader the joy of her living. It's a wonderful balance of laughter, tears and self revelation of your journey. The journey you've been on as well as the one you have yet to embark. I'm not always inspired to write after reading another poet's work, I just like to let it sink in and reflect, but this collection of Shane's work is calling me to write, calling me to the road, calling to my hunger for more.

~ Boris “Bluz” Rogers, National Spoken Word Champion, Emmy Winner, Slam Charlotte NC.

"Shane Manier’s Road Hunger is a high energy volume of poems. The book has many strikingly intense images. There is at least one on every page. The book is a voyage into the senses, not just hunger: “You can read of thirst, / Rimbaud’s mouthless hydra / You can find it in the sweat / beating blushes across the night’s bruise. . . .” There are many aspects of Road Hunger that are brilliant, but I am going to focus on two.

One of them is the vibrant urgency of Manier’s voice. The other is how she insists on painterly showing instead of telling. For as gritty as most descriptions are in a captivating way, there are images that are surreal and powerful. When the latter is the case, there is almost always the presence of the road: “A streetlight makes love to the asphalt.” She never loses focus on her theme.

The speaker of these poems has an integrity to what she is writing about, meaning she has lived these experiences, or they have come to her from a close secondhand source. They are more than literary conventions. This is important in a book that seems to be so autobiographical.

It is, however, also true that Manier is bringing the wild woman archetype to the surface in a new and exciting way. Celtic Queen Maeve and Addiction: An Archetypal Perspective by Sylvia Brinton Perera and Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype by author and poet Clarissa Pinkola Estés are excellent predecessors to Road Hunger. What is different in Road Hunger and the other two classics is that Manier’s Road Hunger has a drama and immediacy that the others do not have, so Road Hunger could be considered an instant classic. Also, Manier does not shy away from writing shocking images. Throughout Road Hunger, one essential feature of the wild woman archetype, which Manier insightfully captures, is that this archetype is not one with nature, but one and the same as nature. Jackson Pollock, a wild man, once said, “I am nature.” It is great statement, but it is another thing to experience it. Shane Manier does not tell readers she is one with nature or that she is nature; she shows us, and that shows her to be a great poet. I highly recommend Road Hunger.”

~ Nelson Gary, Poet and Published Author of Pharmacy Psalms and Half-Life Hymns—for Nothing.

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