Atalanta
An Anatomy

Christine Hume

By redistributing the myth of Atalanta across time and space, and adapting it to the story of my own experiences growing up in a series of rural settings, I investigate the porous space between fantasy and memory. Atalanta: An Anatomy is a cracked meditation on girlhood itself as a precarious object of male violence. As it leaks questions about the fugitive and the feral, the neglected and the hunted, it telegraphically indexes wildness in the human imagination.

“She senses herself here and hides us both in her story; my girlhood lost in her woods. I hear her voice needling like pine in my head. In thinking about her father, Atalanta hunts for memories of herself. Atalanta is not a fossil; she is a red streak melting luminously into the disorientating brightness of noon. Her speed blurs worlds. There may be two ancient Atalantas but their stories share the same picture; they memorize the same disorderly forest where her reds disarray.”

CHRISTINE HUME is the author of three books, most recently Shot, and three chapbooks, Lullaby: Speculations on the First Active Sense (Ugly Duckling Presse), Ventifacts (Omnidawn), and Hum (Dikembe). She teaches in the interdisciplinary creative writing program at Eastern Michigan University