Mine

by Tung-Hui Hu

Something has happened here: An empire has gone to seed, an entire country goes on strike, people begin eating dirt and flowers, and a couple lives on a riverboat to avoid the ground. In Mine, Tung-Hui Hu makes myths out of the personal. He speaks of desire and awkwardness and the earth that contains both. Resonant, blunt, and sharply intelligent, this is writing that excavates.

As history unfolds over and over the same geography, these poems become, as Hu has written, "practice for the living." The book grows out of the poet's interest in how the histories we extract from the land become interlaced with our identity. The book asks, Where do we come from? But also, How do we make amends?

Tung-Hui Hu lives in San Francisco, where he writes on film and new media. Previously, as a computer scientist, he worked on Internet architecture. His first collection, The Book of Motion, won the Eisner Prize and was published by The University of Georgia Press.

Genres: Poetry

66 pages

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Tung-Hui Hu is a poet and a media scholar. A former network engineer, Hu is interested in understanding the hidden mechanisms within digital culture, and imagining alternatives for its future. He is an associate professor of English at the University of Michigan, and his research has been featured on BBC Radio 4, CBS News, Boston Globe, and many other venues.

His new book is Digital Lethargy: Dispatches from an Age of Disconnection, an exploration of burnout, isolation, and disempowerment in the digital underclass. Hu currently lives in Rome, where he is a 2022-23 Rome Prize Fellow in Literature at the American Academy in Rome.

Reviews

[Walter · Rating 2 out of 5]

Something has happened here: An empire has gone to seed, an entire country goes on strike, people begin eating dirt and flowers, and a couple lives on a riverboat to avoid the ground. In Mine, Tung-Hui Hu makes myths out of the personal. He speaks of desire and awkwardness and the earth that contains both. Resonant, blunt, and sharply intelligent, this is writing that excavates.

I was seduced by the above amazon.com review, but I'm not really a poetry person. Maybe if this were a book of essays I would have vibed with it more....

[Theresa Leone Davidson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Princeton graduate and poet Tung-Hui Hu, a person I readily admit I did not know of until his writing was recommended to me, offers up some extraordinary poetry in this, Mine. A person can appreciate and enjoy poetry and not, obviously, like all poets and all poetry; nonetheless, I am confident that if you love poetry, you will love this. Highly, highly recommend!

[henry · Rating 4 out of 5]

this collection has some weak points, but it also has a stunning imagination at work, good control of language, and a final long piece called "the river" that is great.

[Angelina · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poems show extraordinary imagination, intellect, and sophistication. I cannot recommend it more highly.