Mine

Ausable Press/Copper Canyon Press, 2007

Something has happened here: an empire has gone to seed, an entire country goes on strike, people 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 the earth that contains both. Resonant, blunt, and sharply intelligent, this is writing that excavates.

As history unfolds over and over the same geography, these poems become, as Hu has written, “practice for the living.” The book grows out of the poet’s interest in how the histories we extract from the land become interlaced with our identity. The book asks, Where do we come from? But also: How do we make amends?

Praise for Mine

  • "Tung-Hui Hu’s second book of poetry, Mine, is a confident, artful collection—sophisticated and persuasive, memorable and tight… Hu strings images together and builds, in poem after poem, to thoughtful, nimble, resonant conclusions that have an enormous amount of authority… The combination of such an investigative, open-minded approach and Hu’s jewel-like control of imagery and structure make Mine, indeed, a truly innovative and impressive collection. It is not explained easily, and after many readings, its inherent energy has not at all diminished. It is often stunning and always memorable. Hu is clearly a poet of enormous talent."

    Rain Taxi Review of Books

  • "Pound said that poetry should be as well-written as prose. [Mine,] composed of translucent and sinewy sentences set in loosely cascading lines, shows a range of subject matter (history, empire, mythic epilogues) unavailable to more lyrical poets. These poems explore life outside the self. Many take up a narrative ‘he’ or ‘she,’ or a choral, colonial ‘we.’ When the lyric ‘I’ does appear, couched in stories composed from reading as from experience, it too seems to be merely another persona. The result is something other than fiction or history or myth. It is a poetry composed of figments of reality."

    Eisner Prize citation

  • "This fresh and unexpected poet extends the lyric into the social space without losing any of song’s intensity or mystery, so that these casually elegant, affecting poems feel as interior as they are worldly."

    Mark Doty, author of My Alexandria

  • Early Winter, after Sappho

    Some say the air of
    early winter moving through
    windows. For some, black ships

    coming towards the city
    are the quietest sounds on earth.
    But I say it is with whomever one loves.

    And very easily proved:
    when we are trying to think of
    something to say to each other,

    each remembering back
    who said what, the ground
    we’ve already covered,

    you can hear all the money
    lost earlier in the stock market,
    even fresh water slipping
    into salt water.

  • How to Care?

    That month, I wondered where they gathered
    before hospitals, before the oncology ward,
    intensive care, urgent care.

    Back then it was all urgent, binding
    hands and feet, immobilizing the body
    before it could pass into cadaver. Now
    it is easier, to look at photographs instead,

    one of him in his work shirt, collar fraying,
    stretched across his ribs. Another, his daughter,
    who sets his shaven head upon a pillow as if
    arranging flowers. Practice for the living,

    walking through hallways, reading charts,
    X-rays, seeing the hollows of a torso held
    to the light, getting juice from the cafeteria,
    swallowing it, passing it out of me,

    it was like being on an ocean liner, the same
    slowness to move, the same distance from land,
    where men are hurting, men are living.

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