Musca Domestica

Winner of the 1999 Barnard New Women Poets PrizeOne 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 SmokesChristine Hume's poetry has appeared in The Best American Poetry 1997, The New Republic, Volt, Ploughshares, Boston Review, Boulevard, Colorado Review, and many other journals. She teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.