Gorilla

About Christine Hamm

Christine Hamm has published four collections 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. She lives in New Jersey.

Praise for GORILLA

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, author of Nowhere to Arrive and Eye Level

The world of Christine Hamm’s Gorilla is both fanciful and treacherous. In these sharp, vivid prose poems, women and girls’ bodies are under threat, as men break into houses, animals trespass into bedrooms and fathers betray daughters. Language in this collection shocks and startles. Each poem is a surprise. A horse eats a woman’s hair. A cat drags a movie star into a woman’s bed. A dog is transformed into a woman in a garden. A winged baby flies to the ceiling. At every turn, Hamm’s imagination thrills and delights.
—Nicole Cooley, author of Girl After Girl After Girl and Of Marriage

In Christine Hamm’s haunting new collection of prose poems, adolescent girlhood is populated by characters out of a surreal bestiary of family life. They play out scenes both monstrous and quotidian, like dreams that twist into nightmares and then back into dreams within a few turns, or slides viewed through a grotesque Viewmaster where the central actors melt away only to transform and reform later in a different configuration—or conflagration—of searing images and slow burns. The real horror is not a fantastical apparition of fairy tales but that normalized violences become visible only when they sprout feathers and rubber claws.
—Lauren Russell, author of Descent and What’s Hanging On the Hush