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Alaskaphrenia (New Issues Poetry & Prose)

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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.

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.