Poetry. Women's Studies. Winner of the 2019 Tenth Gate Prize. This surreal series of prose poems, harmonic and jarring, pops the reader into a world where the animal is a danger-suit we might all don, or is a force of chaos that breaks families, or America's unconscious hatred of women. Perhaps it is our world, perhaps more real than surreal. One of the most unusual investigations of gender and family, this collection disorders and disturbs, knowing that upending the status quo makes the best manners of all.
Christine Hamm's GORILLA is a potent and wholly original collection that traces--with the indelible strokes of dream logic--the contours of domestic dramas and estranging losses, along with the menaces of masculinity. In these charged pages, we encounter animals in states of power and peril--including eponymous GORILLA, whose actions corrode and haunt, throughout the book--along with flying babies and oddball creatures, all set arrestingly in absurdist tableaus. The emotional complexity limned by Hamm is something to marvel at. These distilled poems are strange and dark enclosures that have 'a mind of [their] own, ' inviting us to be captive to their collective spell and astounding power.--Jenny Xie
As part of this #RandomThingsTours Blog Tour, I am delighted to share an extract from the book with you today.
Safe Word
He was telling you about his toys. He listed things made out of metal and animal hide, things that used electricity and sparked occasionally, things that clicked and linked together. You said you weren’t sure and he said he would go slow, so slow that you would forget to stop him once you began to feel pain. You said it was already hurting and you wanted him to stop. He said he stopped yesterday, that you forgot you were on a boat talking to him on the phone, and that he was still in New Jersey. You said that if he was in New Jersey, why were you still wearing a blindfold. He said you couldn’t see because it was night, and that it was okay to go to sleep now, just close your eyes and let go.
Christine E. Hamm (she/her), queer & disabled English Professor, social worker and student of ecopoetics, has a PhD in English, and lives in New Jersey.
She recently won the Tenth Gate prize from Word Works for her manuscript, Gorilla.
She has had work featured in North American Review, Nat Brut, Painted Bride Quarterly and many others.
She has published six chapbooks, and several books -- including Saints & Cannibals.
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