Christine Hume is the author of two previous books of poetry, and a chapbook with CD, Lullaby: Speculations on the First Active Sense (Ugly Ducking Presse 2008). She teaches for and directs the interdisciplinary Creative Writing Program at Eastern Michigan University, where she co-directs BathHouse Events and hosts Poetry Radio, which features contemporary and historic sound art, performance art, sound poetry, collaborations between writers and musicians, available through iTunes U. She lives in Ypsilanti, Mich., with her daughter, Juna, and partner, Jeff Clark.
In alternating currents of prose and verse, Shot reaches beyond the tradition of the nocturne to illuminate contradictory impulses and intensities of night. Shot inhabits the sinister, visionary, intimate, haunted, erotic capacities to see and hear things at night, in the fertile void containing our own psychological and physical darkness. Via Levinas who locates self-knowledge and ethical contract in insomnia, this darkness is one “stuck full of eyes.” Here the insomniac falls into a Beckettian pattern of waiting, in an inextricable dialogue with a selfhood that cannot settle down. In a perpetual play between empirical and abstract knowledge, tantrum and meditation, Shot creates torque that drives beyond material experience.
