At first glance, the cover for Angela Hume’s Interventions for Women may resemble a stock photo. But then a giant red heart, cows grazing, and a sky too blue and too cloudless to be real make strange the familiar image of an outdoor sculpture garden. On closer inspection, the piece in the foreground becomes sinister: its edges turn out to be pixelated, the places where the valves should stem from are as empty as dark holes, the side “entrance” would barely fit the cow walking past it. A claustrophobic nightmare.
The sculpture is a digital rendering of a physical habitat made of pig cells that have been highly processed and coated in polyester — called “In Vitro Meat Habitat” and designed by the group Terreform 1, whose mission is to “combat the extinction of all planetary species.” In reality, the proposed habitat would have the dimensions of a large salad bowl, a fraction of the scale pictured on the website. Likewise, Interventions for Women oscillates in this way between reality and unreality, between the micro and macro, highlighting impractical solutions to global problems. Its primary conceit operates on the cellular level, concerned with barriers and excess and health.
In “meat habitats,” Hume takes language from Terreform 1’s website, and, as she does throughout the collection, pulls found language into a sparse and cutting lyric:
the proposal:
fabrication of 3D printed extruded pig cells to form
real organic dwellings
a victimless shelter
are you getting enough?
globular protein
mixture
…
and i see violence
everywhere
a fraction of the size of a human hair
i see violence
on your nails wrist teeth gums
Hume responds to the design group’s proposal for a “victimless shelter” with her own: the recognition of “violence everywhere,” down to the smallest detail. Her counter-proposal unfolds as lyric agitates stale marketing language: the tongue trips over all the consonants in “real organic dwellings,” and then lands gently on the unmetered rhyme between “everywhere” and “human hair.” Then: the staccato of “nails wrist teeth gums” draws strain back into the page. The “violence” in the poem shifts focus in its scale, as the speaker reveals and relishes in the pointlessness of this project.
The recognition of constant violence does not resolve when the poem shifts from pig to human, a few stanzas later:
in dreams the violence
is ridiculous
…
woke up to the stun
of a body intact
you thought your body
was your own
but a body is not a boundary
a door is not a dam
Here, the collection’s central thematic query: what populates the space between outside and inside, as in the barriers of cells, the membranes of the body? What happens when these boundaries dissolve? To borrow from Craig Santos Perez, Hume confronts “the porous interiors of women’s bodies.” This obsession defines the collection. In its first iteration: “left me not with a barrier / but a hole.” The poem goes on to describe this image as “a middle-of-the-country / feeling.” Just as the valves on the collection’s cover sit empty, Hume draws our attention to how a body can feel emptied after an assault.
Interventions for Women continues the exploration of bodies (queer, trans, and women’s) and ecology that Hume began in her debut collection, Middle Time. This new book expands on the work of Middle Time by focusing on a single, specific aspect of the ecological system: food, and how racialized capitalism affects food systems and women’s bodies. (Her academic work focuses on queer ecopoetics, the exploration of sexuality, gender, and power in ecological poetry.) Aesthetically, the poems in Middle Time scatter across the page — on first glance, they resemble work by Joanne Kyger or Fred Motens — while the majority of Interventions for Women hugs the left margin. Hume has shifted away from an ecopoetics grounded in the relationship between sex and taxonomy, birds and plastics and desire, and instead has moved towards a stricter, more contained lyric. In many ways, this new collection feels more personal, honing in on the Midwest as subject, more experimental in content than in form. Hume’s Midwest is a porous and at times violent entity which she confronts head on through a lyrical documentary poetics that generates urgent, startling questions.
The collection opens with its shortest poem, the three-page “may the human animals,” while the others fold out over ten times that length. Here, the speaker delivers a series of directives that confront anthropogenic carbon emissions and then shifts to addressing a more human “you.” Hume’s metaphors bend the space between time periods and depths of the planet’s crust, introducing us to the “human animals,” a character type she sets up in this first poem and refers to obliquely throughout the collection. In a quasi-prayer, she asks, “may the human animals … fathom the relief of an earth without them.” These human animals serve as consumers, lovers, subjects, their bodies dumping grounds for excess from production-obsessed food systems:
anthropogenic CO2 emissions
stop the earth from receiving
incoming energy from the plasma
core radiating 4.26 million
metric tons per second more
energy than the earth itself radiates
into space brighter disk limb
darkening
The imagery here offers a physical representation to a nearly-invisible problem: what do carbon emissions look like? Here, the tension lies between light and dark, an expression of power: if the earth could still receive the energy from its plasma core, it would become a brighter disk — but instead the human animals have chosen “limb / darkening.” This phrase pays homage to Sappho’s fragment 130, where she describes Eros as “limb-loosener.” Perhaps, the speaker offers, the human animals have rejected eros and desire in favor of power, control, and production. Still, some element of eros lives on, growing like plasma in the place of the “brighter disc.” Throughout Interventions for Women, Hume deftly creates imagery for what is purposefully obscured from our sight. In this case, carbon emissions and eros.
A 48-page titular poem about food systems as they relate to interlocking injustices serves as the book’s core. The poem pulls language from the EAT Lancet report, a document compiled by scientists and other “experts,” that has been critiqued for its non-scientific and overly simple solutions to large-scale problems. “interventions for women” visually evokes Lorine Niedecker’s “Lake Superior” and the Objectivist poets in its short lines. Like Niedecker, Hume illuminates the ways white working-class Midwestern girls may relate to their environment. Towards the end of the poem, the speaker repeats the phrase “a midwestern childhood is.” At first, posing a question that can be read as the metaphysic, or punchline, of the collection:
a midwestern childhood
is a girl in question
is she a slut is she
a lesbian
The turn between these two stanzas evokes Hume’s characteristic phase change: the girl is forced to grow up, forced to define herself, forced to choose between two undesirable, invisible states. And yet the poem flips, celebrating both sluttiness and lesbianism. After quoting a portion of the EAT Lancet report that advocates for restrictive eating, the speaker tumbles: “into the cake hole / sexual descent.” Sexuality becomes a deluge, an indulgence, an alternative to restrictive eating, and, ultimately, a reclamation of the body. Later: “a midwestern childhood is / granular inscrutable.” The speaker again confronts what is micro, as content mirrors form: the Midwestern child is doubly invisible, from a place and at an age that people dismiss. Yet she finds a way to control the narrative: the childhood becomes granular like sugar and the child herself in control of her own image, impenetrable.
Fittingly, Hume counteracts the restrictions imposed on girls and women by imagining the body becoming more and more diffuse until it ceases to exist. The surfaceless entity then descends “into the food swamp / with ravenous maws.” And yet: this expansive imagery is bounded by short, almost restrictive lines. Hume reveals to us, again and again, that while our search for easy answers or solutions might be futile, a lack of direction must not render the journey pointless.
In an interview with Poets & Writers, Hume notes, “I realized that my feelings of shame around what the dominant heterocentric culture would call ‘failure’ — my ‘failure’ to partner, accumulate wealth, and have children, for example — are related to a feeling I experience when I witness a degraded environment still in the early stages of recovery.” The human body, earth, and manufactured shelter become one in this collection. This collapse is at once suffocating — recovering while being watched— and liberating — a total rejection of this perceived “failure.” In the final lines of the collection, after a consideration of human animals as extensions of redwood trees, the speaker writes:
my bark thickens
with every year now
i keep your words
in my ear now
all i want is to touch you
tell me again what you did
The collection returns to the expansive world of the erotic, replacing hunger for food with hunger for a lover. And while Hume does not present desire as the perfect solution to the layered issues we have confronted throughout the text, these lyrical, almost pop-like lines suggest that we might find solace in abandoning production and returning to Eros. These lines suggest liberation may lie in turning a mirror to that which is hidden from us, without and within.
[Published by Omnidawn Publishing on October 21, 2021, 136 pages, $17.95, paperback]