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Some Electric Hum
2021 Byron Caldwell Smith Book Award for Poetry by the University of Kansas
2021 Nelson Poetry Book Award by Kansas Authors Club
2021 WILLA Literary Award for Poetry Finalist
In Some Electric Hum, Janice Northerns’ first full-length poetry collection, she offers vivid portraits of the marginalized and the forgotten, ranging from ancestors and historical figures to carnival workers, students, and even animals and objects.
“At the core of this book are the raw elements of birth, love, and death; while surrounding them are sophisticated yet impassioned readings of the violence of history, class, and social codes.” —William Wenthe
2021 Nelson Poetry Book Award by Kansas Authors Club
2021 WILLA Literary Award for Poetry Finalist
In Some Electric Hum, Janice Northerns’ first full-length poetry collection, she offers vivid portraits of the marginalized and the forgotten, ranging from ancestors and historical figures to carnival workers, students, and even animals and objects.
“At the core of this book are the raw elements of birth, love, and death; while surrounding them are sophisticated yet impassioned readings of the violence of history, class, and social codes.” —William Wenthe
122 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2020
3 people are currently reading
17 people want to read
About the author
Janice Northerns
2 books19 followersJanice Northerns grew up on a farm in rural West Texas and holds bachelor's and master's degrees from Texas Tech University. An award-winning poet, her work has been widely published in many literary journals, including Ploughshares, The Laurel Revew, SouthWest Review, and Southwest American Literature. After teaching for many years, she recently retired and now enjoys writing full time. Some Electric Hum is her first published poetry collection. She and her husband currently live in southwest Kansas.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
May 8, 2022
Some Electric Hum, Janice Northerns
I published one of Northerns’ poems, “Wildcatter in a Dry County,” in Coal City Review, loving the way that poem depicted oil country gone dry so that “the pump jacks/and drilling rigs have given way to churches/pumping out salvation on every corner.” In the poem, the old wildcatter scrounges for treasure with his metal detector at a carnival ground. Reading her prize-winning collection, I saw that poem after poem hit as hard as “Wildcatter,” with Northerns finding powerful images every time to draw us into each poem.
It happens in the first poem: “White Buffalo Night,” where she laments the killing of the only white buffalo in the herd for being different, the buffalo then celebrated with a fiberglass statue on a Texas courthouse lawn and the annual town pageant called White Buffalo Days. The persona in this poem knows what it is to be “the only one of your kind.” She breaks the legs of the white buffalo statue, and they escape together.
So many of these poems resonated with me. In “Zinnia Women,” the poet’s grandmother sees her grandfather’s whores in the zinnias, or is she imagining them? In a book that hums, I like her tribute to an old woman in “Hummingbird,” “A mother grown old,/living alone: it’s a problem.” So in her late days, on her own, she hums her days away, “like a bat’s echolocation guiding/her twilight flight.” Northerns is always willing to look unflinchingly at tough experience and find language to describe it, as in her poem, “Keeping Watch as My Ex-Husband Dies,” remembering the good times they’d shared but acknowledging that his mind is failing: he doesn’t even recognize their kids’ names.
The poem that stood out for me at a Northerns’ reading, and one that lights up this collection, is “Sparks,” in which lovers are so engaged by their talk of poetry and politics that they don’t realize that there’s been a fire close at hand, emerging to find “one corner/of campus smoldering and soaked,/fire spent, trucks and the arsonist long gone.” Northerns sees her daughter too caught up in “this giddy/room-tilting spin” of love, with the lovers so self-involved that they don’t even know that close at hand “whole kingdoms/are born, rise up, and burn to the ground.”
This collection traces changes in rural America, especially as immigrant workers and their families move in, often to hostility, sometimes to terror threats from vigilantes. In “Wake Up Call,” terrorists plot against Somali families, planning to bomb the apartments of Somali “cockroaches.” Northerns observes that Somali daughters tend to be quite stoic after seeing famine and war in their own country. In “Undone,” Northerns writes of hostility to immigrant workers because they are “undocumented, unwhite, un-us,” their fathers working at Sunflower Beef. This might be the promised land to refugees escaping from war zones, but there’s something ominous about the image of Friday night football while a “mist of blood/and burning bone” rises from the kill floor of the meat-processing plant in town.
Northerns is a storyteller, really, just that her stories are condensed into the minimal forms of concise poetry. Her portraits are striking, like the “Playwright’s Daughter” who, following in her father’s weaving footsteps (he drank himself to death at 41), writes a bit, doesn’t send it out, drinks too much, “racing her daddy to the finish line.” In “North Star,” she shows her father’s decline from strong worker and loving father, “As his warm calloused hands swung/by his side, I’d reach up, land my hand in his,/feel its sure strength guide me back to the path,” to trembling old man reaching out for his daughter’s hand for help.
This is the poetry of “glistening/greased chili dog wrappers,” Lucchese boots, cow chip pitching, a rabbit tossed to a blue heeler, slaughterhouses, Sunflower Beef, poems set for the most part in “barren Southwest Kansas, hardbaked edge/of the Great American Desert,” the sky stretching out for miles.
In the final poem, “Some Electric Hum,” set in Liberal, Kansas, I see Northerns in the footsteps of the great Kansas poets William Stafford and B. H. Fairchild, as she looks at a sky “so crowded with past vocabulary.” Yes, she does draw on Midwestern writers who came before her, but she’s insightful and bold enough to add her own language and vision, never shrinking from ugliness, always finding inspiration in the “hardbaked edge”:
This space masquerading as a mute Kansas stare
unfolds for me now an invitation
to grab hold, grapple with words just west
of the tongue.
Brian Daldorph
I published one of Northerns’ poems, “Wildcatter in a Dry County,” in Coal City Review, loving the way that poem depicted oil country gone dry so that “the pump jacks/and drilling rigs have given way to churches/pumping out salvation on every corner.” In the poem, the old wildcatter scrounges for treasure with his metal detector at a carnival ground. Reading her prize-winning collection, I saw that poem after poem hit as hard as “Wildcatter,” with Northerns finding powerful images every time to draw us into each poem.
It happens in the first poem: “White Buffalo Night,” where she laments the killing of the only white buffalo in the herd for being different, the buffalo then celebrated with a fiberglass statue on a Texas courthouse lawn and the annual town pageant called White Buffalo Days. The persona in this poem knows what it is to be “the only one of your kind.” She breaks the legs of the white buffalo statue, and they escape together.
So many of these poems resonated with me. In “Zinnia Women,” the poet’s grandmother sees her grandfather’s whores in the zinnias, or is she imagining them? In a book that hums, I like her tribute to an old woman in “Hummingbird,” “A mother grown old,/living alone: it’s a problem.” So in her late days, on her own, she hums her days away, “like a bat’s echolocation guiding/her twilight flight.” Northerns is always willing to look unflinchingly at tough experience and find language to describe it, as in her poem, “Keeping Watch as My Ex-Husband Dies,” remembering the good times they’d shared but acknowledging that his mind is failing: he doesn’t even recognize their kids’ names.
The poem that stood out for me at a Northerns’ reading, and one that lights up this collection, is “Sparks,” in which lovers are so engaged by their talk of poetry and politics that they don’t realize that there’s been a fire close at hand, emerging to find “one corner/of campus smoldering and soaked,/fire spent, trucks and the arsonist long gone.” Northerns sees her daughter too caught up in “this giddy/room-tilting spin” of love, with the lovers so self-involved that they don’t even know that close at hand “whole kingdoms/are born, rise up, and burn to the ground.”
This collection traces changes in rural America, especially as immigrant workers and their families move in, often to hostility, sometimes to terror threats from vigilantes. In “Wake Up Call,” terrorists plot against Somali families, planning to bomb the apartments of Somali “cockroaches.” Northerns observes that Somali daughters tend to be quite stoic after seeing famine and war in their own country. In “Undone,” Northerns writes of hostility to immigrant workers because they are “undocumented, unwhite, un-us,” their fathers working at Sunflower Beef. This might be the promised land to refugees escaping from war zones, but there’s something ominous about the image of Friday night football while a “mist of blood/and burning bone” rises from the kill floor of the meat-processing plant in town.
Northerns is a storyteller, really, just that her stories are condensed into the minimal forms of concise poetry. Her portraits are striking, like the “Playwright’s Daughter” who, following in her father’s weaving footsteps (he drank himself to death at 41), writes a bit, doesn’t send it out, drinks too much, “racing her daddy to the finish line.” In “North Star,” she shows her father’s decline from strong worker and loving father, “As his warm calloused hands swung/by his side, I’d reach up, land my hand in his,/feel its sure strength guide me back to the path,” to trembling old man reaching out for his daughter’s hand for help.
This is the poetry of “glistening/greased chili dog wrappers,” Lucchese boots, cow chip pitching, a rabbit tossed to a blue heeler, slaughterhouses, Sunflower Beef, poems set for the most part in “barren Southwest Kansas, hardbaked edge/of the Great American Desert,” the sky stretching out for miles.
In the final poem, “Some Electric Hum,” set in Liberal, Kansas, I see Northerns in the footsteps of the great Kansas poets William Stafford and B. H. Fairchild, as she looks at a sky “so crowded with past vocabulary.” Yes, she does draw on Midwestern writers who came before her, but she’s insightful and bold enough to add her own language and vision, never shrinking from ugliness, always finding inspiration in the “hardbaked edge”:
This space masquerading as a mute Kansas stare
unfolds for me now an invitation
to grab hold, grapple with words just west
of the tongue.
Brian Daldorph
October 25, 2020
It’s not very often that I tear through a slender volume of poetry as if it were a page turner, but this collection grabbed me immediately and carried me right through to the final pages. Northerns’ poetic voice is clear and sharp, and her poems felt like a ride out of this autumnal gray funk of 2020 into the sun baked and timeless streets of Texas and Kansas.
Both lyrical and narrative, her poems are graceful enough to be admired and edgy enough to be timely.
Both lyrical and narrative, her poems are graceful enough to be admired and edgy enough to be timely.
August 11, 2020
A collection that I liked the more I read. Fascinating subject matter and imagery. Some of poems resonated stronger with me than others, yet I liked the rustic details included within them. Looking forward to more.
October 19, 2020
I can't write poetry to save my life, but my friend and fellow Sewanee Writers' Conference alum Janice Northerns sure can. I just finished her beautiful collection of poems, SOME ELECTRIC HUM. The voice is distinctly American, it tells stories of birth, of death, of love, and all the complicated connections between.
August 28, 2021
SOME ELECTRIC HUM vibrates with life, specifically the full and vibrant life of the speaker. The poems are populated with character and characters that seem to walk off the page fully formed. The poet's eye serves to deliver descriptive language with bite. In the gorgeous title poem "Some Electric Hum" Northerns embodies William Stafford and B.H. Fairchild and the long poetic tradition of evoking the spirit of place, of bringing land to language and to life. She does it beautifully in this debut collection of poems.
July 26, 2022
This is a wonderful, highly readable book of narrative poems. It draws from all aspects of the author's life and the subject matter is both personal and topical. I recommend it to anyone even slightly interested in poetry, as it is filled with accessible stories of observation, with detail and emotion. Particularly notable is how the author captures the flavor of an era, a place and time, and the sometimes hidden beauty of the Western US finds its way into the imagery in unexepected ways. This is storytelling through poetry at its best.
November 27, 2020
This book has wonderfully poignant and beautifully written poetry. The care in which each poem has been written is evident in its precise and lyrical word choices. This evokes a wide array of emotions, from sorrow to joy and even a sense of motivation to do what is right as some poetry reveals the injustices that many struggle with. This is a beautiful book.
July 5, 2025
There’s a wild woman in these pages ... but I’m never quite sure if it’s the author herself, or the characters she so studiously scrutinizes ... and I sometimes felt like I was one of them. (We didn’t know each other at the time of publication, but we’ve been getting to know each other through Kansas Authors Club.) We certainly don’t need to ask Janice Northerns to “tell us what you really think!” In the tragedies and triumphs from the very first page, she is quick to expose irony and to call for justice—all with a flair for alliteration, internal rhyme, enjambment, and other poetic techniques. Yet no detail in life is too “unpoetic” for her pensiveness nor pen, no profession unworthy of reflection. It includes words you may not expect to find in a book of verse: proxy, Scooby Doo, bottomland, Mr. Pibb, unhobbled ... oh, there are more but I don’t want to ruin any surprises for you. And I realize this is not a poetic reaction, but it may be a telling one that I found myself saying “holy s***” several times after re-reading some pieces and having grasped their meaning—at least, I think I did. Most of the poems are free verse, but not all, and there’s a gem of sestina that’s an anniversary poem dedicated to her poet spouse—but absolutely not cheesy in any way, I promise. This award-winning debut is masterful and brilliant and I look forward to Ms. Northerns’ future works! #ReadLocalKS
December 4, 2025
Some Electric Hum is brilliant, at times grittily beautiful, and filled with life’s relatable complexities. Janice Northerns calls herself a poet. I call her a storyteller. Her masterful descriptions of time, place, and life transport you to a Texas diner, a dusty transient carnival, the haunting New Mexico landscape, and to windswept southwestern Kansas. She reminds us of the heaviness of dying love and the hopeful heat of new passion. The hum of Northerns' evolution resonates through beautiful phraseology that showcases her exquisite grasp of language turned art. Her daughter’s hair “so much blonde shrapnel,” a tombstone’s dash between born and died becomes “the messy living in between blown away by a stonecutter’s breath,” and finally an unexpected Kansas invitation to “grapple with words just west of the tongue.” Northerns speaks to coming of age, parenting, racism, death, and the desire to be free and still belong somewhere. The title caught my attention. The poems took me on an intimate journey.
August 22, 2025
I enjoyed Some Electric Hum, a collection of poems by Janice Northerns. Her poems explore the realities of life. They are unapologetic, sometimes raw and weighty but approachable. The poet conveys her messages with clarity and creativity. I highly recommend this collection of poetry. #readlocalks
January 11, 2026
Janice Northerns “Some Electric Hum” buzzes with the energy of life, love, and lust!
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews