The Under Hum by Simone Muench and Jackie K. White Review by Jenny Grassl

The Under Hum by Simone Muench and Jackie K. White

Review by Jenny Grassl

Publisher: Black Lawrence Press

Publication Date: 2024

ISBN: 978-1-62557-070-3

Pages: 66

Single image photographs are often perceived as “true.” A double exposure, two images overlapped, is sometimes described as manipulated or untrue. In the case of the poems of The Under Hum, the collaboration of two women authors offers a double exposure, and also myriad exposures, as famous writers’ lines are incorporated into the poems. The “trueness” of this poetry is striking, silence and voice intertwining in images of numbness and muteness, and also frayed stories told, delivering a texture as well as hefty content,” Pall.” The natural world links to human vulnerability. “Mulberries / in the backyard, first time, a cushioned mess / of mauve stain, bruising, caress, then forgivings,” “Recast. “

Natural phenomena, such as fog and the sea, become states of the speaker. Shape and substance shift as though painted into emotion, as in “Wild birds flying from a seaborn eternity to a pistol crack” The interruption of the eternity of time with those startling words is characteristic of these poems— pastoral, exploded, “Of Salt and Ache Rendering.” Human interactions may come from somewhere else in the natural world as fraught moments, ” every touch is a little sear of frostbite from that space beyond the human,” “Another Broken Glass. ” Escape from the earthbound and real happens early in the collection, using images of nature in surreal contexts. In a graphic poem about the tongue cut in two, a word in the mouth becomes a hawk, wing. This, “Like smoke cannot be contained.” Again, a challenge to silence, an ode to speech, served by fantastical transformation, “Scorch.”

Further deliciously complicating the book are golden shovels and centos, poem forms using the lines of other writers. The language jars us with its integrity, despite a stretch into the otherworldly. A ‘you’  in “Elegy Lined by Maxine Kumin:” is “a photograph of a scorched prairie strewn with martini glasses.” In “Rotation: ” Praise is raised for a mutilated world including plants, such as tomatoes, and also the world of tools and inventions, the blade that cuts those tomatoes. Language is sometimes used as an almost opaque medium describing an image, as in “My Body Is an Endless Eye: ” tornadoes revolving in the mouth. Or it is translucent, with questions to the self , ” Am I the outline or the interior? Or an offering between…” “Self-Portrait Lined by Akhmatova. ” A completely transparent medium: language in the poem “Coda” tells the story of saying no to a he who says yes, and the resulting wound. These layers of exposures and all the varying clarities (which are experienced subjectively), transform ordinary space into lyric and mythic space. “Self-Portrait Lined by Bella Akhmadulina:”

                            I metaphorize: // I'm a bad limerick, a photograph / of gray
                            static; a shorn wick. I wax into skin into cuneiform. / Then 
                            I syntax. I stone the stone.

The language lights up nerve networks, creating an electrical tapestry of connecting threads. “Slow Dive:” Cobweb, feather, tattoo, and debt find synaptic affinities. These connections become syntax, described as “A ruined map,” “Portrait as Landscape: Untranslatable: ” An example, “a container of shatter, of ‘I don’t matter.’ ” The map-ruining is the beauty of this work, but the disruption is also accomplished through image and diction. Juxtapositions of Object and place often occupy an intimate space contradicting the expected distances between them, taking leaps in the lines. Change of Scale, kingdom (animal, vegetable, mineral), and geography accomplishes this magical space. “Transit:”

                            Pretend may / 
                            make real, after all: that tiger, its fur could be / 
                            an orange-lit corridor to a cosmos where learning / 
                            leaves us bright as fern fronds unfurling our know-how / 
                            from tongue to river, as we ride the mythical to//
                            milky way implosions.

It would be easy to attribute frequent contradictions in the work to its collaborative origin—two women writing as one. There must have been moments where they disagreed. Perhaps there were, but the seamless voice presented here indicates that the authors probably arrived at an embrace of contradiction, weaving opposing ideas to hold as one. A female gaze made of a complexity of viewpoints prevails, like gossip: how is the act of someone in the community understood from multiple, often contradictory perspectives? Gossip builds a model of “facts” to aid understanding. In “Portrait of Landscape: of Grisly, of Lovely: ” “A girl is both tiara and shadow,” (She is….) “a garnet of grisly, of lovely, of lonely,” 

“Self-Portrait Lined by Mina Loy:”

                            All the opposites / I've bartered braid into quilt and cloak/. 
                            Then opposites unfold / and I don't know which turning to 
                            take.

“Portrait as Landscape: Shell Game: “Too many / contradictions? Or just adept       shapeshifter:/ giving the slip to swindlers, the game rearranged.” 

In this book, poems tell of things falling apart, but the breakage becomes raw material to re-imagine the loss, uprooting, or puncture, often finding a possible and maybe outlandish solution. False arrests and mass graves will perhaps transform to chandelier light, “Overture.” Shelter is found in dead leaves. Melodies stream through barbed wire, “Rebuttal,” and in “Recast:” a severed finger is sent spinning into a lake: 

“Recast:”

                            the sun magnifying / a ring's opal fire and its milky
                            insistence / that we break everything we love, the way // I 
                            broke apart the carnation corsage,/ the way you broke my 
                            bargaining lips / on the belt buckle gift. 

The authors have broken the idea of the solo author, sequential narrative, and ordinary syntax, to invent a language winged, reassembling.

Who exactly is a “self” in a collaboration? Portraits as Landscape and Self Portraits, with borrowed lines from a host of writers, abound. These lines and the sharing of poem authorship create a collective self that takes on the otherness as its own. This forging of identity calls into question our ideas of the individuality of poets in relation to their works. We land in a place of shared creative consciousness, an alterity carried by a stream of an extra-rich unconscious. A poem is rarely born out of thin air, but is often perceived as though it was. Even the most original poetry bears tracks of borrowing and sharing, however faint. Here, this fact is celebrated. Golden Shovels and Centos where lines of other poets are the chief material, further multiply the layers of self. A self has an inward and an outward-turned energy. This book is a story of introspection turned inside out to become a view to a horizon. Portraits unfold inner worlds, transforming them into landscape. The exterior can also change to interior. In the tiger poem again, tiger becomes a corridor. 

“Our stripes blaze into words., / weave our bodies toward the sea, toward velocity,” “Transit.” Or, in “Portrait of Landscape: of Grisly, of Lovely:” “She is sketch and sky. A pine tree trail / circling a cindered home.” A decidedly outer self. There is nothing wishy washy about this inner and outer shifting. It moves in precise and burning language: “Scorch:” “What was dulled or tamed clamors for vibrancy, for verb / fusing the full one that I am, sending  / the next arrow sharp and fiery.” The Under Hum flies with that next arrow, to all collective creation. 

Simone Muench is the recipient of an NEA Poetry Fellowship, the Meier Foundation for the Arts Award, and the 2023 Lewis University Career Scholarship Award. She is the author of seven full-length books, including Lampblack & Ash (winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Poetry and New York Times Editor’s Choice; Sarabande Books), Wolf Centos ( Sarabande Books), and Suture, co-written with Dean Rader (Black Lawrence Press). She serves as a senior poetry editor for Tupelo Quarterly, faculty advisor for Jet Fuel Review, and poetry editor for Jack Leg Press, as well as being the creator of The Hungry Brain Sunday Reading Series, which she co-hosts with Kenyatta Rogers. She received her PhD from The University of Illinois at Chicago and directs the writing program at Lewis University where she teaches creative writing and film.  

Jackie K. White earned her PhD in Creative Writing (poetry) from The University of Illinois at Chicago with concentrations in Latinx/Latin American Studies and Women’s Studies and was a professor of English at Lewis University for 15 years where she is now Professor Emerita. She has served as an editor for the literary journal Rhino and as a faculty advisor for Jet Fuel Review. Her poems and translations have appeared in ACM, Bayou, Fifth Wednesday, Folio, Quarter After Eight, Spoon River, Third Coast, Tupelo Quarterly , among others, and she was the co-translator, with Frances Aparicio, of César Rondón’s The Book of Salsa ( UNC PRESS, 2008 , as well as assistant editor of They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). Chapbook publications include Bestiary Charming, 2006 Annabiosis Press Award; Petal Tearing & Variations, Finishing Line (2008); and Come Clearing, Dancing Girl Press (2012), and, in collaboration with Simone Muench Hex and Howl, from Black Lawrence Press (2021). More of their collaborative poems appear in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Cincinnati Review, Denver Quarterly, Hypertext, The Los Angeles Review, Pleiades, and Shenandoah, among others.  Though a long-time native of Illinois, she now resides in Colorado.

Jenny Grassl is a poet and visual artist living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her poems have appeared in Ocean State Review, The Boston Review annual poetry contest, runner-up prize selected by Mary Jo Bang, and Heavy Feather Review. Her poems have also appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Bennington Review, Lana Turner Journal, and many others. Her book, Magicholia, was published in 2024, from 3: A Taos Press, and her second full-length collection, Forever Mistaken for Ourselves, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press.

21 May 2025