Ausable / Copper Canyon Press, 2007
Excerpts
Sample passages from Mine, the poetry collection by Tung-Hui Hu, on desire, awkwardness, and the earth that contains both.
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Opening lines
The collection opens with a scene in which the ground itself has become something to be avoided:
SOMETHING HAS HAPPENED HERE: an empire has gone to seed, another country goes on strike, some begin eating dirt and flowers, and a couple lives on a riverboat to avoid the ground.
In Mine, Tung-Hui Hu makes myths out of the personal. He speaks of desire and awkwardness and of the earth that contains both. Resonant, blunt, this is writing that excavates.
As history unfolds over and over the same soil, these poems become, Hu writes, “practice for the living.”
Throughout, the poems turn the ordinary and the awkward into myth, working outward from personal ground toward shared history. The movement is described as excavation rather than confession: language laid down over soil and reopened.
Passages above are reproduced from the publisher’s description of Mine. For the complete text, see the book.
Themes in the excerpt
Desire, awkwardness, earth
- Desire — named directly as one of the collection’ subjects.
- Awkwardness — the second movement of the same sentence, kept beside desire rather than resolved.
- The earth — described as containing both, and as the ground that history repeatedly unfolds over.
| Title | Mine |
|---|---|
| Author | Tung-Hui Hu |
| Publisher | Ausable Press / Copper Canyon Press |
| Published | Spring 2007 |
| ISBN | 978-1-931337-33-5 |
Tung-Hui Hu is also the author of The Book of Motion (2003). His poems have appeared in The New Republic, Ploughshares, and AGNI.