Description
Were you raised to be a girl? The kind of girl who grows up to be a woman? Were you shamed for being not girl enough or too much girl? Were you looked at, talked over, touched, fed, psychiatrized, or indoctrinated in ways you didn’t want to be or didn’t understand? Were you told that if you’d just smile and try to be happy, everything would be better? At a certain point, did you look around and start to see how big the system is that holds you, a system that wants to use you up, along with everyone and everything around you? Did you start to see how it uses you in order to use others, and how you suffer as a consequence of that use while also benefiting from it? Did you start to see how complicit you are in every part of it? Are you sick, grieving, furious, on fire? Did you answer yes to some of these questions? To none of them? Then this book is for you. I wrote this book for you.
Endorsements
Written between fires and uprisings, the Pacific coast and “shelf stable” midwest, Interventions for Women aches. In the long title poem, Hume performs a kind of gene sequence on the violence of white girlhood as it is built into the DNA of climate change: agrobusiness, surveillance, sexual violence, “settler / colonial eating.” Connecting food insecurity to disordered eating to forms of mutual care and collective resistance, these poems place themselves in the debt of earlier feminisms. It is no mistake the book begins with a prayer of galactic biological dimension and reaches towards new sequences of relationality: “love is a cord / and all love is political.” —Stephanie Young, author of Pet Sounds
Angela Hume’s profoundly intimate collection imagines how the porous interiors of women’s bodies are harmed and sickened by sexual violence, the industrial food system, racist fascism, climate change, and environmental contamination. In the middle of everything, Hume rehearses acts of tenderness, empathy, courage, and desire in order to protect and “love the body in its / one life its singular intensity after all.” —Craig Santos Perez, author of Habitat Threshold
This is poetry about the vast, interlocking systems of capitalism, agriculture, fossil fuels, genetic engineering, patriarchy, heteronormativity, settler colonialism, and white supremacy. This is poetry that declares “the truth is not / new but still // mostly very / difficult to face.” This is poetry that asks, “what is poetry but / a bloc // a collective self- / defense act”? This poetry is indeed a powerful counter to our death- and profit-driven culture, which harnesses our bodily and psychic desires with food and commodities and societal structures that do us profound damage and cannot nourish us. This is poetry that commands us instead to “love the body in its / one life its singular intensity after all.” And it is a love song to the “profound intimacy / of a material world” in which we find ourselves, together. Thank you Angela Hume for facing truth. We have never needed this music more. —Brian Teare, author of Doomstead Days
Author bio
Angela Hume is the author of the full-length poetry book Middle Time (Omnidawn, 2016). Her chapbooks include Meat Habitats (DoubleCross, 2019), Melos (Projective Industries, 2015), The Middle (Omnidawn, 2013), and Second Story of Your Body (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2011). She also co-edited Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field (University of Iowa Press, 2018). Angela is at work on a nonfiction book about the feminist self-help movement in the Bay Area (AK Press, 2023).
