The cover of Christine Hamm’s chapbook, Things You Can Do with a Sharpened Pencil, features a mid-thirties-ish woman with gleaming blonde hair pulled back into an elegant chignon, perfect red lipstick, and diamonds draped over a bare neck, giving a pleased yet wary glance at herself in a small round mirror. Woman, mirror, and coloring are all soft and feminine, in the fifties’ décor style, and the woman’s reflection in the mirror seems slightly off-kilter, the reflection looming larger than her averted face, the view we have of her reflection more straight-on than the angle of her head. This cover image is a wonderfully appropriate emblem for the poems inside, both in terms of their subject matter and quality. The poems are elegant yet off-kilter, unrelenting in their gaze yet always willing to be dazzled by the voices they reflect—and by their own allure. They reveal beautiful and deliberate views of womanhood and whether it is ever possible to be at home with oneself and with others, to believe in “Some / Thing warm / … overflowing my cupped hands,” as suggested in “The Promise.” The title reminds us that these overflowing or mirrored views occur through language, and Hamm’s delicious sense of humor, balanced as it is by her tenderness and disdain for sentimentality, makes this collection truly absorbing and intellectually as well as emotionally far-reaching.

One can read these poems almost like a novel, not because they try to express a cohesive narrative, but because they seem to pull you along with their swift dramas and the poetic persona comes across with great appeal and directness. I found myself reading to find out what happened next in these brilliant, severe little dramas of dirty angels, swearing secretaries, sex addicts, women who imagine themselves as houses, and girls who tear and soil their dresses. Their structure, thoughtful but unpretentious and mostly unvarying (with the exception of several competent and funny prose poems, and the lovely “The Coming of Age in Palo Alto,” a pantoum), contributes to the novelistic feel. Many of the poems are in fact like a mirror-image of its speaker, and their dance between pitilessness and exquisiteness left me grateful for the “dizziness / tingling and explosions” of Hamm’s poetic vision (“Science gone mad”). “The Cul de sac Angel,” the second poem in the book, describes a trashy but tender spirit, whose wings are “made of safety pins, / used tampons and bottle caps” and who swoops down in the night to kiss “the place under / the left breast / of all the middle-aged single women / in Ohio.” The touch of this suburban angel is, for these women, like

…the start of a heart attach
or the glowing thumbprint of a saint
or how a thumbprint might feel
if a saint were to touch her
or anyone to touch her:
Anyone who wasn’t
coolly shaking
her hand
goodbye.

This poem is typical of Hamm’s treatment of the women in her poems who together form the novel-like character: imaginative, tender, brutal. Hamm seizes her vision in highly precise ways in order lift our reading through visceral immediacy into a more spiritual—though no less pointed—fascination with the lovely and trashy details of a woman’s life. Hamm never goes for the easy way out; her voices demand our full attention, her images surprise and seem, at their best, to open up a small space in our own awareness. “Highway 1,” a noir-saga of love and crime (which often overlap in Hamm’s poems), conveys a precarious, dangerous journey haunted by “Gunshots like wood slapping wood,” a bullet hole in the door: “I can fit my littlest finger into it, / the metal split like an orange peel.” The scene is gritty while also surreal, dreamlike while also palpably textured. The poem concludes with a surprising, heartbreaking image that plays on the delicate pungency of a little finger in orange-peel metal: “I remember the smell / of our dirty naked toes, / touching.” One of the poems is entitled “Joy School,” and it seems in some ways a poetic manifesto, in claiming the “tiny mice paws / in the mud,” and “straw / and teach,” and a “few white feathers,” as the stuff of this speaker’s joy, rather than the vast canvases of other artists’ joy. “My joy teaches me small,” the poem tells us, and indeed, the linguistic canvases of these poems glimmer with particular triumphs, defeats, sadness, and joys that, together, reflect a luminous energy.

To purchase Christine's chapbook click HERE