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.


Book Description
Musca Domestica is the common housefly. And housefly is exactly the right metaphor for this poet: from the ordinary things of life--illegible postcards, a view of a hillside wind turbine, and the quiet day spent a home--Christine Hume's poems take flight into a realm of dizzying invention and abundance. This is poetry that rewards the reader's efforts with riches.


About the Author
Christine Hume has won a Writing Fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown for 1998&-99 and a 1998 Colorado Council on the Arts Grant. Her work has recently appeared in The New Republic, Arshile, Boulevard, The Best American Poetry 1999, Colorado Review, Conjunctions, Fence, The Journal, Ohio Review, and Volt. She lives in Denver, Colorado.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Musca Domestica is the common housefly. And housefly is exactly the right metaphor for this poet: from the ordinary things of life--illegible postcards, a view of a hillside wind turbine, and the quiet day spent a home--Christine Hume's poems take flight into a realm of dizzying invention and abundance. This is poetry that rewards the reader's efforts with riches.

FROM THE CRITICS

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 Cahners Business Information.|

Catherine Daly - Boston Review

Christine Hume's Musca Domestica, winner of the 1999 Barnard New Women Poets Prize, is an intricately made and richly dexorated book, well researched, well documented and surreal.

Kirkus Reviews

The Barnard New Women Poets Prize was awarded to this first collection of enormously imaginative poems written by the winner of a recent fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center and a grant from the Colorado Council on the Arts. From the deceptively simple title (musca domestica is Latin for housefly) to the poems focusing on such philosophically sophisticated subjects as the meaning of meaning, everyday life is presented as we rarely consider it—skewed and in language and syntax designed to please linguists more than ordinary readers. Hume's titles intrigue: "Lies Concerning Speed," "Map Drawn from Memory by My Brother," "Total Things Known about Motion," "A Million Futures of Late." At the same time, the poems themselves are puzzles, the best of them in the simultaneous spirits of Wallace Stevens and E.E. Cummings ("Didn't you see it sky the sum?"), the least simply confusing, as if the speaker were caught in a world in which all images were surreal ("I shuffle layers of pulp / feathering gossip") and most syntax was arranged as if to duplicate that of a foreign tongue. Some poems contain striking, meaningful ideas or images ("Because the unadorned always subject the adorned to their proofs"; "from a rock jetty / five monks ease their hems / into the river"), but a reader must wade through too much weedy language to reach these few brilliances. In one of the collection's most successful poems, "Articulate Initials," Hume fantasizes actual lives within the illustrations surrounding illuminated letters. Here her description remains singularly focused, with the fine result thatshereaches unexpected but earned epiphanic conclusions. Too many poems in the book offer only dispersed images and so many of them per poem that any luminosity is diluted. An ambitious collection that fails more often than it shines.