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Hover
Poetry and prose that takes on multiple forms to celebrate queer polyamorous families.
Liza Flum’s Hover focuses on queer polyamorous families, considering the ways people in radical family structures are both highly visible and erased. From hummingbirds to stars, historical records, and cemetery monuments, Flum searches for images to represent lives and loves like her own and to find lasting traces of queer and chosen family. In the poetic lexicon of Hover, hummingbirds become emblems of ungraspable survival and vitality, while records on paper and in stone afford enduring, though limited, representations.
The book explores sexuality, love, reproductive choice, and infertility in sonnets and expansive prose meditations. Linked stanzas, which act as little rooms, suggest the intermingling of bedrooms, doctor’s offices, and hospital rooms. The many forms in this collection claim space, both on the page and in poetic discourse, to make the intimate outwardly visible.
Liza Flum’s Hover focuses on queer polyamorous families, considering the ways people in radical family structures are both highly visible and erased. From hummingbirds to stars, historical records, and cemetery monuments, Flum searches for images to represent lives and loves like her own and to find lasting traces of queer and chosen family. In the poetic lexicon of Hover, hummingbirds become emblems of ungraspable survival and vitality, while records on paper and in stone afford enduring, though limited, representations.
The book explores sexuality, love, reproductive choice, and infertility in sonnets and expansive prose meditations. Linked stanzas, which act as little rooms, suggest the intermingling of bedrooms, doctor’s offices, and hospital rooms. The many forms in this collection claim space, both on the page and in poetic discourse, to make the intimate outwardly visible.
- GenresPoetry
92 pages, Paperback
Published April 14, 2025
8 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 22, 2025
Excellent, excellent, excellent. I loved this captivating collection of poetry about queer love, a healthy polyamorous family, an IV fertility journey, and sapphics finding safety and home in one another.
Thank you to the publisher for my copy! I will cherish it!!
Thank you to the publisher for my copy! I will cherish it!!
August 26, 2025
‘Stories we tell about stars on Earth’ – A refreshing view of love and meaning
New York poet Liza Flum earned her MFA in Poetry from Cornell and her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Utah, and following awards and publishing poetry in several journals she makes her literary debut with HOVER. Emerging as a major voice in LGBTQ+ literature, Liza’s new volume of poetry (and poetic prose) flies effortlessly from page to page like the hummingbird she frequently references, and once opening this brief volume the attention is arrested to the final page. She explores sexuality, love, and ‘queer polyamorous families’ in a unique manner, encouraging understanding and contemplation. A brief excerpt follows:
‘Whatever stories I write, my language makes us separate. An editor flags my use of the word “wife” to describe you, the woman I love. She says this word is “a wish rather than a description,” that I invoke an impossible marriage as it slips away. A wedding vow, I’ve read, is the most powerful act of language. When I first wrote about us I thought I could speak us into wedlock…’
Constructive thoughts are woven with ethereal trills of poems that that winningly take flight with ease. This is a most impressive volume of poems and meditations froma gifted poet. Recommended on many levels.
New York poet Liza Flum earned her MFA in Poetry from Cornell and her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Utah, and following awards and publishing poetry in several journals she makes her literary debut with HOVER. Emerging as a major voice in LGBTQ+ literature, Liza’s new volume of poetry (and poetic prose) flies effortlessly from page to page like the hummingbird she frequently references, and once opening this brief volume the attention is arrested to the final page. She explores sexuality, love, and ‘queer polyamorous families’ in a unique manner, encouraging understanding and contemplation. A brief excerpt follows:
‘Whatever stories I write, my language makes us separate. An editor flags my use of the word “wife” to describe you, the woman I love. She says this word is “a wish rather than a description,” that I invoke an impossible marriage as it slips away. A wedding vow, I’ve read, is the most powerful act of language. When I first wrote about us I thought I could speak us into wedlock…’
Constructive thoughts are woven with ethereal trills of poems that that winningly take flight with ease. This is a most impressive volume of poems and meditations froma gifted poet. Recommended on many levels.
May 27, 2025
This book feels really important. Flum's poetry is cautiously optimistic in the way it carves out space for chosen, nontraditional families. Legalese twists into anti-cliché lesbian poems while hummingbirds and gravestones become the aspirational icons for a future where love finds its own shape. A strikingly frank volume of queer beauty. Funny, feminist, formalist, and grownup; there isn't anything quite like Hover.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews