Musca Domestica (Barnard New Women Poets Series) (Paperback)

by Christine Hume (Author), Heather McHugh (Introduction)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Stretching the image of a fly-on-the-wall to its hilarious and surprisingly weighty breaking point, Hume's debut swings in and out of the fragmented, microcosmic prospective of the title organism--the common house fly-and mines "domestica" for its many insinuations of the roles middle-class adult women assume within houses. Calling the poems "a flypaper palimpsest," Hume's speaker sometimes morphs into her controlling metaphor ("I am climbing into sidewalk-mica charging a bus window"), sometimes indirectly skims back and forth across it: "I'll be the picture of flightiness today." When they're on, the poems dive right into the contradictory heart of hermetic household existence. Adopting the famously house-dwelling Dickinson's habit of including alternate phrases at the bottom of the page, a section of six poems at the book's center are paradoxically the most forceful in their diffusions: "Revolving as if the key/ to propulsion were a belief/ in vanishing helixed to the brain// Glass jars shake in the dark;/ we eat sugar from spilling handfuls/ because starving requires// Her head stolen, her arm still curved/ against her husbands back ." Heather McHugh picked the book for this year's Barnard New Women Poets Prize, and Susan Wheeler checks in with a blurb; Hume's thick, fast-moving stanzas recall both poets. Her work might best be called by the emergent term "ellipticist," in that its verbal fugues circle around a stable subjectivity and elevated lyricism, here offering funny and baroque recastings of identity's misfirings. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"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. As intricate as a medieval tapestry, Musca Domestica shows how imagined worlds are forms of knowledge about the real world in which we live. This book is an engrossing adventure into the unknown as it shares, questions, and reinvents the boundaries of the known: 'caterpillar-shape link fetal-shape link bullet-shape link question mark.'" -Ann Lauterbach, author of On A Stair "In Christine Hume's new book, Musca Domestica, the poems are so rich and dense they seem not merely to be written on the page, but they seem to be embossed upon it, driven into it-or, as she says, "stitch[ed] up . . . in devotion to inner commands, whatever the invisible demands." These poems are almost tactile: Musca Domestica is a fabrication, close-textured and substantial, heavily worked and demanding. This is poetry to aspire to. It is extravagant, intelligent, and lavishly articulated." -Lynn Emanuel, author of Then, Suddenly "Marvelous thick, 'high' language characterizes this collection, from the tour-de-force of the opening poem's meditation on the word 'fly' to an extraordinary final trilogy's fusing of notions which are often, these days, held to be opposing: transparency and fragmentation, self and the impersonal. Musca Domestica is both the common household fly and a constellation. These moving poems have the gravity of the unflinching and the dazzle of stars." -Susan Wheeler, author of Smokes

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 76 pages
• Publisher: Beacon Press (April 21, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807068594
• ISBN-13: 978-0807068595
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,510,184 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #11 in

  Books > Literature & Fiction > Authors, A-Z > ( M ) > McHugh, Heather

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stunning, etc., March 11, 2003

By	Sticky P. (Caer Siddi) - See all my reviews

This is a stellar collection, one of the best books of poetry to come out within the last five years. Hume's imaginative and lexical virtuosity are stunning; this woman can flat-out write--she infects, vivisects, reinvents, and sheds tropes and rhetorics with ingenuity and exhilirating speed; there is nothing her sentences won't or can't do. These poems do not shy away from complexity(asking them to do so is to deny what it feels like to inhabit our respective mortal nimbuses astride a blue pill in the vortexical whirl of space, i.e. is cowardly and reductive and anti-human); they are unrelentingly sensual, rabidly intellectual, awe-inspiring in terms of rendering the treacheries and odd wonders of consciousness. The language is riotous, sophisticated, brilliant, the formal invention masterful. Christine Hume is a visionary poet, Musca Domestica a gospel of the in-between-- this book is alive. If you can't hang with it, grab some William Collins, hail the short taxi, and sleep the sleep of stones.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the style is the substance, March 10, 2003

By A Customer

I am disheartened by the most recent reader reviews of Miss Hume's Musca Domestica. I wonder what's at stake for these readers to excoriate a poet's first book so aggressively, especially since they clearly mistake style for something having to do with the poet's personality--that Hume purposefully, for the sake of "being hip," makes her poems "inaccessible." Style is an ideological position, and Hume uses the housefly to underscore what it means to make poetic decisions: the veerings-off and anxious cleanings and cleavings of the housefly are perfect tropes for a certain kind of poetic intent. This book is tongue-tying, flirtatious and beautiful: its 'meaning' is the story of a medium, and is not the story of a personality nor the narrative of a feeling. That the book might defy certain people's theories about what a poem "should be" is just another selling point for me--personally, I'm sick of the straight story. Give me the crooked details of illegible postcards and a "body remembering itself as part of a house" so I can be more in touch with what is means to live with and work against the languages we think through. This book is not the mockery it's made out to be in recent reviews--it crackles with living verbs, it troubles language but doesn't make it run away.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars are we all reading the same book?, June 15, 2003

By A Customer

I know a reader-review should respond to the book itself, and not the comments of the other reviewers, but this recent batch of negative reviews are so wildly off the mark that they beg correction. I don't know what these readers are thinking, but it seems to me like they either haven't read 'Musca Domestica' or simply lack the faculties to read it fairly.

In any case, potential buyers, don't be discouraged by these nonsensical reviews. 'Musca Domestica' is an incredibly rewarding book: the poems are only difficult in the way that the most intriguing and beautiful puzzles are difficult. These poems reward in every way: Ms. Hume manages to be funny and poignant and provoactive and weird all at once, and the more time you spend with this book the more delightful it becomes.

Give 'Musca Domestica' a try -- the poems have earned it, and the book will richly repay your attention!

And to you 'readers' in the one-star crowd: snap out of it, kids.