Mine

The Book

Making myths out of the personal

In Mine, Tung-Hui Hu makes myths out of the personal. He speaks of desire and awkwardness and of the earth that contains both. Resonant, blunt, this is writing that excavates.

As history unfolds over and over the same soil, these poems become, Hu writes, “practice for the living.”

The collection was published in spring 2007 by Ausable Press, now part of Copper Canyon Press. ISBN 978-1-931337-33-5. It was a winner of the 2007 James D. Phelan Literary Award.

Tung-Hui Hu is also the author of The Book of Motion (2003), and his poems have appeared in The New Republic, Ploughshares, and AGNI.

Mine gathers a body of poems that treat the ground beneath us as both a literal field and a figure for memory. Tung-Hui Hu writes in a voice that moves easily between the intimate and the historical, letting soil, water, seed, and river carry the weight of larger stories. The title suggests a seam of ore running through ordinary country, and the poems work the same way, uncovering buried histories in plain, resonant language that refuses to be ornamental about its subjects.

The sequence of poems is marked by political unrest and its echoes: an empire gone to seed, another country on strike, people eating dirt and flowers, a couple living aboard a riverboat to avoid the ground. These images are not metaphors for one another so much as neighbors, each pressing its claim against the same landscape. The effect is of a book that excavates rather than decorates, digging downward through layers of time until private experience and public history meet in the same field.

Hu's poetic practice is blunt and resonant at once. Lines arrive with a plainspoken force, and the poems do not trouble themselves with false elegance; awkwardness, desire, and decline are permitted to stand without smoothing. Yet beneath that directness lies a careful attention to the physical world, to ploughshares, greenhouses, lighthouses, water, and the slow work of seed and soil. The result is writing that feels lived rather than arranged, a lyric that keeps returning to what the earth contains.

Published by Ausable and Copper Canyon Press, the collection is framed by the history of the ground it names. Across these poems, history unfolds repeatedly over the same soil, and that recurrence becomes the book's central argument rather than its background. Repetition here is neither decorative nor pessimistic; it is a method. What the poems offer is a practice for living, a way of standing in a landscape that has already been occupied, argued over, and altered by those who came before.

The book has also been read by critics and presented in public settings, where readings and discussions have amplified its plainspoken insistences. Reviewers have noted the collection's taut economies, its refusal of easy consolation, and the ways it holds political and personal material in the same breath. The poems move with a kind of controlled motion, each gesture opening into a larger field, so that a small domestic detail can sit alongside empire, strike, and exile without feeling diminished by the comparison.

Read alongside the wider arc of the poetry it extends, Mine suggests that the land is never a neutral backdrop but an active participant in what happens to people. Digging, sowing, eating, fleeing, and waiting are all acts of relation to the ground, and the poems attend closely to each. The collection's quiet radiance comes from this attention: a world described with tenderness, then held up plainly for inspection, leaving the reader with the sense of having stood in that field and seen what has been buried there.

More on this site

Continue with Mine

• Excerpts — sample passages from the collection, on desire, awkwardness, and the earth.
• Reviews — critical reception, including a review in Rain Taxi Review of Books.
• Appearances — public readings and events recorded for 2013.
• About the Author — biography, education, and earlier publications.
• Where to Buy — purchase the book directly.

Publicity inquiries: Joseph Bednarik · joseph@minepoems.com