Shot Christine Hume

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.

Christine Hume is the author of two previous books of poetry, and a chapbook with CD, Lullaby: Speculations on the First Active Sense (Ugly Ducking Presse, 2008). She teaches for and directs the interdisciplinary creative writing program at Eastern Michigan University, where she codirects BathHouse Events and hosts Poetry Radio, which features contemporary and historic sound art, performance art, sound poetry, and collaborations between writers and musicians, and is available through iTunes U. She lives in Ypsilanti, Mich., with her daughter, Juna, and partner, Jeff Clark.

from Andrew Joron: “Hume’s signs are actual scenes, shot mostly at night, of transgression & transfiguration. Shot (as in ‘moon shot,’ or ‘who got shot?’ or ‘give it a shot’ or ‘that gear is shot’) marks the condition of wound and wager, of termination and release. How calmly Hume contemplates, even as she creates, a crisis of the object of language! Her surrealism is as lawless, and as reasoned, as that of Maldoror. Like a monster, she can see around the very corners of existence. She cradles abandon in this book.”

from Carla Harryman: “Shot brings back the night alive’ through an insistent, wild, erotic attentiveness that engages insomnia as if it were a lover, who, however demanding, has been encountered and embraced as a worthy partner. Like the later writings of Kathy Acker, Hume’s poetry pursues a new mode of experiential thinking, located in an uncanny architecture of somatic existence touching the physical world. This is gorgeous, courageous writing.”

A review of “Self-Stalked” from Shot (Counterpath, 2010)
by Christine Hume