A Daily Glance
Christine Hamm's The Animal Husband discusses animals, food, sex, and gender. It gets into gender right away with the first poem: "Who has not wished her husband into a cat?" It plays with concepts about women's "roles" and also with the concept of a "husband." The chapbook also brings in several types of animals, though cats definitely predominate. I was not quite sure how the cats and the gender issue tie together, but the cats seem tied to the female. We have other animals like rabbits, dogs, monkeys, and birds. Interestingly, the poems seem like they should be straight-forward, but they are not. It seems like we should laugh somewhere, but I'm not always sure where. In all, the chapbook makes me want to look into Hamm's new book Saints & Cannibals.
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