Overview

Poetry and prose that takes on multiple forms to celebrate queer polyamorous families. Liza Flum's Hover focuses on queer polyamorous families, considering the ways people in radical family structures are both highly visible and erased. From hummingbirds to stars, historical records, and cemetery monuments, Flum searches for images to represent lives and loves like her own and to find lasting traces of queer and chosen family. In the poetic lexicon of Hover, hummingbirds become emblems of ungraspable survival and vitality, while records on paper and in stone afford enduring, though limited, representations. The book explores sexuality, love, reproductive choice, and infertility in sonnets and expansive prose meditations. Linked stanzas, which act as little rooms, suggest the intermingling of bedrooms, doctor's offices, and hospital rooms. The many forms in this collection claim space, both on the page and in poetic discourse, to make the intimate outwardly visible.

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9781632431646

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Reviews

""'I have never wanted to be mystified, ' Flum writes in one of the startlingly insightful prose works that support the volume's filigree, feathery, flightworthy verse, all hummingbird and hunger and momentum: these poems keep their hummingbird consciousness thoughtful, attentive, in motion, 'almost flying, ' even as its fertilities and their impediments yoke it to our biologically complicated Earth. Can hummingbirds marry? Can they take multiple lovers? Human beings like this powerful poet can, and we do, and we need poems about that taking, and that giving, and those satisfactions, and those needs. Flum offers a starship, an aviary, a sanctuary in half-crowned sonnets and other rooms, durable, breathing, bruised.""--Stephanie Burt, author of We Are Mermaids ""Elouard says, 'There is another world, and it is in this one.' Flum's poems ask us to consider what might be proper figures for love the world declines to see. Perhaps birds?--the smallest ones and fastest, darting and head-butting, negotiating or imposing terms. And maybe the right form to express this love is the sonnet--in glorious multiple enactments--or the micro-essay? In these poems, such creatures and forms emerge into their moments, shimmering with life and light. As a new generation discovers not so much how to open and reconfigure love's possibilities as how to imagine and enable the possibilities we have always had, Flum's gorgeous book wings onto the scene and hovers: quick and glimmering, fierce, iridescent.""--Katharine Coles, author of Ghost Apples ""Hover is smart and it smarts--each poem lands like a dart into the cork of the mind and heart. Pinning ideas with forceps and form, the poet turns and upturns tradition in a kind of zoetrope, faster and faster, animating what was, only moments before, in singular rendering, still. Stillness (a momentary pause) and stillness (the endurance of a thing) makes this shimmering debut a distillation of nectar essential for those of us living in 'bodies with wings.'""--Benjamin Garcia, author of Thrown in the Throat

Author Information

Liza Flum is a poet and teacher. Her poems have appeared in journals including AGNI, Narrative, Poet Lore, and Washington Square Review. She is a recipient of a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant, and her writing has been supported by fellowships from the Saltonstall Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Aspen Summer Words, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center. She lives with her family in the Finger Lakes region of New York.

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