At the end of 2019 Christine Hamm’s startling collection Gorilla was selected as the winner of the Tenth Gate Prize. The pandemic may have slowed down production of this true original, but it’s worth the wait!
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? You’ll have to read it to decide for yourself. One thing’s for sure: this unusual investigation of gender and family will disorder and disturb.
Jenny Xie describes Hamm’s Gorilla as “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.”
Christine Hamm has published four books of poetry exploring the roles of animals, fairytales, gender, and violence. Her poems have been published in Painted Bride Quarterly, Rattle, Rhino, and Pinch. She also has an MSW from NYU, an MA in fiction writing, and is half-way through an MFA in poetry from Columbia. Hamm spent twelve years helping to house homeless women in New York City before she became an English Professor. She lives in New Jersey.