Alaskaphrenia (New Issues Poetry & Prose) [Paperback]

Christine Hume (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 193097440X | ISBN-13: 978-1930974401 | Publication Date: March 2004

Poetry. Winner of the 2003 Green Rose Prize. "ALASKAPHRENIA is unlike anyother 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.It is, like Alaska, American and not, a place of plenitude and claustrophobia simultaneously. You1ll want to live there because it exhilarates" -- Bin Ramke

Editorial Reviews

Review

"...this Alaska-of-the-mind Hume offers us is a glittery, glamorous place of old words and new syntaxes..." -- Bin Ramke

...Hume's mind wittily and triumphantly takes wing--beyond what it knows and toward 'whatever's uncertain is alive.'" -- Rosmarie Waldrop

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, Michigan, with her daughter, Juna, and partner, Jeff Clark.

Product Details

• Paperback: 78 pages
• Publisher: New Issues Poetry & Prose (March 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 193097440X
• ISBN-13: 978-1930974401
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,583,243 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Christine Hume is the author of Musca Domestica (Beacon Press, 2000), Alaskaphrenia (New Issues, 2004), Lullaby: Speculations on the First Active Sense (Ugly Ducking Presse, 2008), and Shot (Counterpath, 2009). She teaches in and directs the interdisciplinary Creative Writing Program at Eastern Michigan University, where she hosts a radio show/podcast, Poetry Radio, available through iTunesU.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Deja Vu, April 7, 2005

By 

Quebec1000 (QC, Q) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Alaskaphrenia (New Issues Poetry & Prose) (Paperback)

Christine Hume's Alaskaphrenia incorporates the skeletal organization of a textbook and exploits its conventions. The book opens with comprehension questions which imply a narrative to come. We have knowledge of Alaska before we pick up Hume's poems but the story of this Alaska which awaits us is like none we might have expected. The first poem insinuates that we have already read the story or that our journey begins at the end. On our way through, we encounter titles which serve as glossaries, an index of ecology, an appendix ready to burst, and prefatory comments which prepare us for the exit out of the book. Except we can't leave Hume's poems so easily. The tidy rhetoric of textbooks can't prepare us for the richness we encounter. Asked to answer Hume's comprehension questions, we set images of Alaska against one another. But we are stultified when we come to the conclusion that the figures in her poems are absolute: they have no shadows, no Alaskan ghosts. The poems raise poetry up over Alaska as if to say poems are as big as Alaska, and they can't be flattened. Yes, textbook rhetoric can be fun, but it will get you nowhere. What remains is the nakedness of each word, the absolute conviction that the poems could not be expressed in any other way, cannot be reduced to content, comprehension be damned. Instead, there is an unqualifiable speech which is never obscure.

8 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars for Six Letters, April 4, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Alaskaphrenia (New Issues Poetry & Prose) (Paperback)

This book is like fire. Snapping, hot, untameable. And it is like a stand of cold trees that have never been, cannot be infected. It is said that Alaska is vast, unpioneerable, killing, cold, attached to these states by force of will; it is huntable, secret, majestic, frozen, remote. In _Alaskaphrenia_, it is six letters and the roar of a tongue and guts that have left it, thought it, seen it. This book would have been read and recognized by Maiakovksi, Laure, Mina Loy, and Artaud. As a contemporary work, it is in dialogue with no one, it feeds from no one else's work, it borrows nothing except for air in order to burn, and it has the speed of nature.