About the Book
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.
About the Author :
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.
Review :
"Here, the hummingbird serves as a metaphoric emblem for the intricacies of queer, polyamorous relationships, much in the way mermaids have served as an emblem for portions of the trans community. Flum returns again and again to the iridescence and actions of the hummingbird (and other avian symbols), exploring a kind of prismatic partnership with a lover, her lover’s husband, and the speaker’s other lovers. . . . Flum manages to make the reader an intimate outsider, rather than simply a voyeur, to relationships that do not fit the hegemonic definitions our heteronormative society puts forward. She has no need for exploitative exoticism, and her speaker is not exploring out of boredom but out of a deep calling to the deep. It is the book’s soulfulness that I admire. This is a collection about the soul-work of making a family, and how we can choose delight even when we’re not fully seen, fully recognized. Even as we are in a constant state of 'becoming,' as Judith Butler suggests, we can still choose delight."
“‘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.”
“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.”
“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.’”
