Synopses & Reviews
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.
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." Feminist Review
Review
"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." Carla Harryman
Review
"Contrary to its title,
Shot is mostly not a violent book but a nocturne — a fluid, continuous nightscape of dark pines and graveyards, owls, ghosts, and moons. Rather than sending out a projectile or even a somnambulist to wreak havoc on sleeping citizens, the speculative direction of this book is always inwards, marking and remarking interior borders:
I surveyed an inner shore. Its facets operated on me. I lost my lights and began my midnight thus: mental feet, mental lake, little mental pines, mental mile around the muzzle."
Joyelle McSweeney, Rain Taxi (Read the entire )
Synopsis
Poetry. 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.
About the Author
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.