Winner of the 1999 Barnard New Women Poets Prize

Musca Domestica (Barnard New Women Poets)

Literature & Fiction

Hume, Christine

History & Criticism

Beacon Press

“A dauntless and harrowing indictment of patriarchal violence.” —Publishers Weekly\nIn Everything I Never Wanted to Know, Christine Hume confronts the stigma and vulnerability of women’s bodies in the US. She explores bodily autonomy and sexual assault alongside the National Sex Offender Registry in order to invoke not solutions but a willingness to complicate our ideas of justice and defend every human’s right to be treated like a member of the community. Feminist autobiography threads into historical narrative and cultural criticism about the Victorian-era Frozen Charlotte doll; the Nylon Riots of the 1940s; the movie Halloween; Larry Nassar, who practiced in Hume’s home state of Michigan; and other material. In these reflections on sexuality, gender, criminality, and violence, Hume asks readers to reconsider what we have collectively normalized and how we are each complicit, writing through the darkness of what we don’t want to see, what we’d rather not believe, and what some of us have long tried to forget.

Everything I Never Wanted to Know (21st Century Essays)

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Mad Creek Books

Saturation Project

About the Author\nChristine Hume is the author of three books of poetry and six chapbooks, most recently, Question Like a Face (Image Text Ithaca), SATURATION PROJECT (Solid Objects, 2021), A DIFFERENT SHADE FOR EACH PERSON READING THE STORY (PANK Books, 2020), and SHOT (Counterpath Press, 2009). Since 2001, she has been faculty in the Interdisciplinary Creative Writing program at Eastern Michigan University.\nLiterary Nonfiction. "The genre-defying genius of SATURATION PROJECT brings memoir and essay to the land of myth. Here, the wildness of what we experience, that which cannot be controlled but controls nonetheless, finds expression through etherealizing and visceral saturations of the body: a feral, humming, windswept girlhood mapped with uncharted brilliance."--Claudia Rankine 
"Christine Hume tells of that hum neither utterance nor song that is so inside us and that hum that is everywhere in crowds, in industry, in nature. She tells of wind, unconstrained force, in which we exist, stand and advance. A child, lost or abandoned, is nurtured by a bear in Greece, in India, in Azerbaijan, in Champagne, in Kansas. Christine Hume tells her daughter she is that child, and she sees her daughter being nurtured by another species. So many profound and surface things Christine Hume brings close to us with her so crystal words so luminous with thought."--Alphonso Lingis

Saturation Project (Solid Objects)

Essays & Correspondence

Solid Objects

Literary Nonfiction. "The genre-defying genius of SATURATION PROJECT brings memoir and essay to the land of myth. Here, the wildness of what we experience, that which cannot be controlled but controls nonetheless, finds expression through etherealizing and visceral saturations of the body: a feral, humming, windswept girlhood mapped with uncharted brilliance."--Claudia Rankine "Christine Hume tells of that hum neither utterance nor song that is so inside us and that hum that is everywhere in crowds, in industry, in nature. She tells of wind, unconstrained force, in which we exist, stand and advance. A child, lost or abandoned, is nurtured by a bear in Greece, in India, in Azerbaijan, in Champagne, in Kansas. Christine Hume tells her daughter she is that child, and she sees her daughter being nurtured by another species. So many profound and surface things Christine Hume brings close to us with her so crystal words so luminous with thought."--Alphonso Lingis

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

Alaskaphrenia

Poetry

New Issues Poetry & Prose

Poetry. In alternating currents of prose and verse, SHOT reaches beyond the tradition of the nocturne to illuminate contradictory impulses and intensities of night. SHOT inhabits the sinister, visionary, intimate, haunted, erotic capacities to see and hear things at night, in the fertile void containing our own psychological and physical darkness. Via Levinas who locates self-knowledge and ethical contract in insomnia, this darkness is one "stuck full of eyes." Here the insomniac falls into a Beckettian pattern of waiting, in an inextricable dialogue with a selfhood that cannot settle down. In a perpetual play between empirical and abstract knowledge, tantrum and meditation, SHOT creates torque that drives beyond material experience.

Shot

Counterpath Press

Literary Nonfiction. A DIFFERENT SHADE FOR EACH PERSON READING THE STORY is a disability-forward essay that melds memoir, neurology, chromopoetics, and literary criticism into an ecstatic embodiment of an illiterate girlhood. Shaped as an index, rather than a primary text, Hume posits the cruel optimism of reading, which promises to shape brains and lives, against the dyslexic's subterfuge intelligence. In vignettes, meditations, lapses, guesses, and fragments, all refracted through the color red, this work questions what reading means and how we come to claim it.

A Different Shade for Each Person Reading the Story

PANK Books

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Books by Hume, Christine