Contrary to the book’s title, Let It Die Hungry is a collection of poems bursting with life. Recklessly sensual, provocative and profoundly curious, Meissner’s coming-of-age poems seek to anchor their place in a messy world, blurring the edges of hard borders and disparate identities. Sprinkled with the author’s illustrations, the book’s multidisciplinary approach also includes lesson plans, originally utilized in a women’s prison, that invite the reader to write their own way out of polarizing dichotomies—and into the vast grey space of what it means to be alive.