Molly Bendall review in Lana Turner:
Christine Hume dwells so near the spine of language in her new book Shot that it brings a psychic territory into stunning focus. The ontological chamber here includes sleeplessness and states of altered sleep and wakefulness, while night becomes as seethingly alive as it was for Baudelaire or Djuna Barnes. The poems adopt various formats but often contain rhythmic devices, such as anaphora and single word repetitions, that give them a mode of seriality and sequencing, “You may pound this night as much as you please//You will never pound into me what you think//You say the contrary, and the lashings madden//Night thinks you should pay for it//Pound at your belief until it’s empty of you” (“Um,Um…”) This poem as well as several others is made up of a litany of unfinished sentences with each behaving as its own stanza. They feel suspended yet they’re tethered to common words and rhythms. The language is torqued with drama and the urgency of speech acts, while rhythms trigger a physical reaction as in an incantation or lullaby. Even as the language performs in order to persuade or induce, “Let a wolf lope out of a word out of a fog” (“Some Are Born to Endless”), a feverish combativeness ruptures the spell. What occurs under night’s sovereignty must be endured. Sometimes it feels as if one has stumbled on a brightly lit capsule in the middle of the night where an interrogation or operation is underway or a film is being “shot.” A wilderness is evident here, too, Dantesque with shades and beasts, which seems to give words and syntax a sense of permission and abandon, “Werewolf werewatch the muzzle in the ugh comes here comes the hum” (“Telempathy”). Words and phrases are compelled to unfold, distort and even morph multiple times, producing lush neologisms and portmanteau words, such as “gallopbark,” “limedusk,” “sweatwilds.” In the complex and ruptured theatre of this book a self emerges that yearns for transformations and perhaps a release from itself. The periodic engagement with demands and limitations of the physical body, including a mother’s body, re-awakens for the reader the presence of a speaker. In the last poem “I Exhume Myself” the author puns on her own name and moves toward a gesture of resolution with lines that finally end in periods, “I don’t root down into your dream.//I will not dig a fetus out of my throat.//My hands will never find it.” This book is electrifyingly gorgeous. Christine Hume sings from inside the language.
"[Hume] manages to realistically illuminate a portion of an experience often left in the dark without sacrificing detail or deflating that mystery’s potency." --SubtleTea.com [full review]
Home Video Review of Books [scroll down]
From Feminist Review:
When read aloud, Hume’s poetry has a certain melodic quality, by turns both jarring and soothing. This skillful placement of words goes hand in hand with an ability to create rhythm that evokes action. [full review]
From NewPages:
In Shot, “Dreaming is a blindness that looks back,” Hume’s rearward glancing taking us in – into the body’s innerscape, nightmare and dream, into the dark unfathomable one-become-two. Gorgeous, unsettling, her language pushing at boundary and expectation, willing its transformation along a parallel passage with that of the gravid, burgeoning body: growth, dis-ease, illness, ill-at-ease, self and not self, bodied and born. Bodying birth. Hume writes a language of the body, a bodied language. A vocabulary of gestation, mother and child, lover and beloved, two selves, or many, one, Shot barrels down a frayed border where no relation is a settled one, the words that compose her journey rocketing us into that fabulous other world where “your skin itself is a black moon / Set against the black lapping.” [full review]
"Hume’s signs are actual scenes, shot mostly at night, of transgression & transfiguration. Shot (as in ‘moon shot,’ or ‘who got shot?’ or ‘give it a shot’ or ‘that gear is shot’) marks the condition of wound and wager, of termination and release. How calmly Hume contemplates, even as she creates, a crisis of the object of language! Her surrealism is as lawless, and as reasoned, as that of Maldoror. Like a monster, she can see around the very corners of existence. She cradles abandon in this book.”
––Andrew Joron
"Shot 'brings back the night alive' through an insistent, wild, erotic attentiveness that engages insomnia as if it were a lover, who, however demanding, has been encountered and embraced as a worthy partner. Like the later writings of Kathy Acker, Hume’s poetry pursues a new mode of experiential thinking, located in an uncanny architecture of somatic existence touching the physical world. This is gorgeous, courageous writing."
-- Carla Harryman
Praise for Lullaby: Speculations on the First Active Sense :
"It is precisely because there is great line after great line, any and all of which are quotable, that Christine Hume’s writing (which I read for the first time tonight) immediately interests me. She doesn’t try to come to any “cohesion.” Cohesion in poetry too often creates entropy, which stops motion (and also stifles emotion) rather than offers up eternal possibility within structure. When the book ends, there is a feeling that the language is still changing, shifting, searching for connections..…The connection of language to experience and the experience of language as chance within structure (both time and the page) is . . . immediate and intoxicating"
—Ryan Gallager in Bootstrap News July 2008*
Praise for Alaskaphrenia, winner of the 2003 Green Rose Prize and named as a "Book of the Year" for 2004 by the Small Press Traffic Literary Arts Center.
“The harsh reality of Alaska drives these poems inward in search of a habitable world, though they mostly find the Snow Man’s ‘nothing that was there.’ For ‘winter pierces the brain direct’ and usurps even the imagination: this is a place where ‘fantastic animals stand beside real animals.’ In spite of such obstacles Hume’s mind wittily and triumphantly takes wing—beyond what it knows and toward ‘whatever’s uncertain is alive.’”
—Rosmarie Waldrop
“Alaskaphrenia is unlike any other book I have read—as indebted to Melville as to postmodern poetics, its pleasures are terrors, and yet all its terrors are sly and seductive, and necessary. ‘Even if you’ve never seen a dead person before, your body will know what to do’ is a typically, disturbingly ambiguous lesson the book has learned—this Alaska-of-the-mind Christine Hume offers us is a glittery, glamorous place of old words and new syntaxes, of elemental dangers and pleasures previously unknown to American poetry. It is, like Alaska, American and not, a place of plenitude and claustrophobia simultaneously. You’ll want to live there because it exhilarates.”
—Bin Ramke
"Hume has not outfoxed intelligence–with her way with words, her sound chains, her rhetorical detours, her artistic cunning to poetically reinvent, and distract–she has wooed it. Her words most often remind us of our inability to know what a poem is. If her forms distrupt expectations, they do so in a world made cunningly. We are armed with our capacity to imagine. The consciousness stays painfully awake. How, these poems ask and with dark humor, can words still sing in the music of noise?"
–Molly Lou Freeman, Xantippe
". . . Alaskaphrenia combines seamlessly its feelings and the high-concept, place-creating theories it comes from. The poet's intellectual imagination and emotions never clash here; neither one loses sincerity from being given too much priority. Emotional density and Hume's active imagination meet perfectly to create a huanting book of disease, mainly a mental disease called Alaskaphrenia."
—Scott Woodham, Anchorage Press
"If you put Gertrude Stein and Jack London into the machine from the movie The Fly, and mixed their DNA, this is book the reconstituted poet would write. These poems create and recreate a physical and a metaphysical Alaska, a kaleidoscopic, scary Alaska of the mind, where not only nature it seems, but language too can kill . . . Reader, be brave. Breathe deep; step into the frontier Christine Hume has opened for you.
—Brent A. Terry, New Pages
"And although this book has plenty of surface glitter and language play, most of Hume's lines are not mere showpieces for her virtuosity. The book as a whole is almost relentlessly severe, lonesome, and flavored throughout with pitiless admonitions such as, 'Bears in spy skins approach. Never let what you think fool you.'"
—Sun Yung Shin, Rain Taxi
"Hume’s felicitious aural patterning puts a sensational spangle and spin on her words. Her poems reward and reworld multiple readings with deeper ever and more pleasurable mystery."
—Heidi Lynn Staples, Verse Magazine
"In Christine Hume's new book Alaskaphrenia, she creates a work that is just as much an exploration of the Alaskan landscape and mythology as a cartography of human consciousness. Her poems, dense, abstruse, and sometimes touchingly human, like the mythical worlds first discovered by ancient mariners, both draw upon and collapse the distinction between dialectical extremes we use to create meaning in the world."
—Greg Hill, Bridge Magazine
"...Hume risks the very impossibilities she so effectively exposes, and ventures daringly into these most extreme territories—interior and exterior, textual and terrestrial."
—Rusty Morrison, Talisman
Praise for Musca Domestica:
"One finds here a powerful search for the face of the human hidden, or sequestered, among the myriad things which Christine Hume's profuse lexicon and agile attention bring to the surface of her work. . . . This book is an engrossing adventure into the unknown as it shares, questions, and reinvents the boundaries of the known."
—Ann Lauterbach
