Reviews
of Alaskaphrenia
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Winner of the 2003 Green Rose Prize
“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 remin 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