The Under Hum

What happens when two women write self-portraits “lined” by famous writers? The answer lies in the collaborative magic of Simone Muench and Jackie K. White’s The Under Hum, a gorgeous panoply of golden shovels, centos, and tangy tercets to make you love poetry again as a celebration of the thrills and surprises of language. “We are a strange syntax that cannot be mapped,” say the poets. And we were happy getting lost in their “Portrait as Landscape” sonnets, the sublime terrain constantly shifting and blooming with music metaphor, “with mirrors and seasons…stuck between no way and anyhow,” reminding us in the best possible way that “everything human is made up” and, in The Under Hum, we get to take pleasure in the result.

–Denise Duhamel & Maureen Seaton, co-authors of Caprice: Collected, Uncollected & New Collaborations