Notes on Wolves and Ruin

Christine Hamm is an exciting and innovative voice in contemporary poetry. Notes on Wolves and Ruin, her latest collection, challenges the many hierarchies we tend to impose upon types of language: text and paratext, prose and its margins, traceable language vs. what cannot or will not be attributed. By eschewing a main text constrained by its own importance, and embracing the paratextual zone, Hamm opens up the possibility of risk, beauty, and transformation where the reader does not expect to find it. Here the margins are revealed as a space where the implicit politics of language can be questioned, interrogated, and wholly transfigured. —Kristina Marie Darling, author of Dark Horse and The Disappointment Acts