Christine Hume is the author of Musca Domestica, winner of the Barnard New Women Poets Prize (Beacon, 2000). She teaches at Eastern Michigan University.

About Alaskaphrenia:

"The harsh reality of Alaska drives these poems inward in search of a habitable world, though they mostly find the Snow Man’s ‘nothing that was there.’ For ‘winter pierces the brain direct’ and usurps even the imagination: this is a place where ‘fantastic animals stand beside real animals.’ In spite of such obstacles Hume’s mind wittily and triumphantly takes wing—beyond what it knows and toward ‘whatever’s uncertain is alive.’"
—Rosmarie Waldrop

"Alaskaphrenia is unlike any other book I have read—as indebted to Melville as to postmodern poetics, its pleasures are terrors, and yet all its terrors are sly and seductive, and necessary. ‘Even if you’ve never seen a dead person before, your body will know what to do’ is a typically, disturbingly ambiguous lesson the book has learned—this Alaska-of-the-mind Christine Hume offers us is a glittery, glamorous place of old words and new syntaxes, of elemental dangers and pleasures previously unknown to American poetry. It is, like Alaska, American and not, a place of plenitude and claustrophobia simultaneously. You’ll want to live there because it exhilarates."
—Bin Ramke