Christine Hamm

Gorilla Christine Hamm

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