Musca Domestica

Stretching the image of a fly-on-the-wall to its hilarious and surprisingly weighty breaking point, Hume's debut swings in and out of the fragmented, microcosmic prospective of the title organism--the common house fly-and mines ""domestica"" for its many insinuations of the roles middle-class adult women assume within houses. Calling the poems ""a flypaper palimpsest,"" Hume's speaker sometimes morphs into her controlling metaphor (""I am climbing into sidewalk-mica charging a bus window""), sometimes indirectly skims back and forth across it: ""I'll be the picture of flightiness today."" When they're on, the poems dive right into the contradictory heart of hermetic household existence. Adopting the famously house-dwelling Dickinson's habit of including alternate phrases at the bottom of the page, a section of six poems at the book's center are paradoxically the most forceful in their diffusions: ""Revolving as if the key/ to propulsion were a belief/ in vanishing helixed to the brain// Glass jars shake in the dark;/ we eat sugar from spilling handfuls/ because starving requires// Her head stolen, her arm still curved/ against her husbands back ."" Heather McHugh picked the book for this year's Barnard New Women Poets Prize, and Susan Wheeler checks in with a blurb; Hume's thick, fast-moving stanzas recall both poets. Her work might best be called by the emergent term ""ellipticist,"" in that its verbal fugues circle around a stable subjectivity and elevated lyricism, here offering funny and baroque recastings of identity's misfirings. (Apr.)