Christine Hamm

Girl into Fox Christine Hamm

"If 'You say your house is burning, / I say mine is sinking'-and so the games begin. As its title suggests, in Girl into Fox we are never permanently sure who is becoming predator or prey. Etched with beauty and rich ruin, Hamm's lyrics call upon the reader to reinvestigate the traumatic. They resituate our sense of threat-accepting it, like 'a dragonfly [that] flies into your mouth / and stays there.' These poems are just as fluttering, monstrous, vivid, and humane."

Jay Deshpande, author of Love the Stranger

"In these sparse, haunting lyrics, Christine Hamm captures the terror and uncertainty of girlhood. She asks, 'What is a girl/ if not a rack of unprocessed meat, ' and her poems answer this question through their startling and tactile images, surprising leaps and magnetic fissures. The book is called Girl into Fox, but it could just as well be 'fox within the girl;' as her poems remind us of the wild, dangerous, cunning potential within what appears to be the merely innocent."

Joanna Fuhrman, author of The Year of Yellow Butterflies

"Christine Hamm's fourth book, GIRL INTO FOX, is a book I can't stop thinking about. Playfully surreal and vivid, Hamm puts the 'world' in 'otherworldliness' and uses poems as a way to process childhood hurt through adult imagination. As the title suggests, these poems conjure animals-their wild tameness, their keen sense-to show how a girl (or woman), hurt and afraid, relies on legend and fable to find a language that illuminates... Shifting from comfort to discomfort, objects of heart and home become physical representations of sore memories. ... This book of poems forges an understanding of what it is to live in the aftermath of pain, how trauma never goes away even as it is constantly overcome."

Farrah Field, author of Rising and Wolf and Pilot and co-founder, Berl's Poetry Shop