Hive

by Christina Stoddard

Overview

Hive is a remarkable debut collection of poems about brutality, exaltation, rebellion, and allegiance. Written in the voice of a teenage Mormon girl, these poems chronicle an inheritance of daily violence and closely guarded secrets. A conflicting cast of recurring characters-best friends, sisters, serial killers, and the ominous Elders-move through these poems as the speaker begins to struggle with the widening gulf between her impulse toward faith and her growing doubts about the people who claim to know God's will. Ultimately she must confront what it means to believe and what it costs to save ourselves.

Winner, Poetry, Association for Mormon Letters Awards

Finalist, da Vinci Eye Book Design Award

Finalist, Washington State Book Award for Poetry, Washington Center for the Book

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780299304249
Publisher:	University of Wisconsin Press
Publication date:	03/12/2015
Series:	Wisconsin Poetry Series
Edition description:	1
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	6.06(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.22(d)

About the Author

Christina Stoddard grew up in Tacoma, Washington, as a member of the Mormon church. She earned an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro where she was the Fred Chappell Fellow. She is currently the managing editor of an economics journal at Vanderbilt University and lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
 
I
Bodies of Two Girls Found in Woods
Party Where Maureen Pierced Everyone’s Ears
This Time the Marina
The Oxford Unabridged
At Little George’s House, the Christmas Lights
Stayed Up All Year
I Am Thinking of Salmon
Hive
The Profession of the Whale
Jacks
Abby’s Mother Shows Us Where Ted Bundy
Signed Her Yearbook
Maureen
I Ask My Father If the Green River Killer’s Victims
Go to Heaven
 
II
Fifteen Girls
Help Thou Mine Unbelief
Appetite
Tuesdays at Young Women’s Activity Night
Goldfish
The Man Who Built My Basement Bedroom
Grandmother Educates Her Darlings
Westward On the Dance Floor a Chaperone
Ownership
How to Make Up for Unhealthy Habits
Korihor the Anti-Christ
Excommunication
 
III
Our Mother Who Art in Heaven
What Tacoma Was
Raped Girl’s Mad Song
High School Yearbook
I Must Return to the Company of Saints
Some Ungodly Hour
Let It Come to Pass
Thistle
The Origin of the Ampersand
Judges Chapter 4
God Made Everything Out of Nothing, But the Nothingness Shows Through
Antigone Inverse
When My Mother Asks Me to Write Something
Nice, I Can’t
What It Is to Sin
What If God Had Said It Differently

Editorial Reviews

"With harrowing precision, Stoddard explores what it means to face violence as a child. Hive wrestles not only with acts of violence but also with religion's failure to make sense of them. Narrated in the voice of a teenage Mormon girl, each poem adds to a catalogue of transgressions both small and monumental. . . . Like bees, determined and dangerous, these poems hum with an energy all their own."--Chapter 16


"Hive investigates the intersections of religion, race, class, and sexuality with grace and knowing. This is a revisiting of a Pacific Northwest that we often forget in our rush toward nostalgia--while the world was busy lauding the grunge scene, women went missing in the woods, and children died in the streets. Stoddard's exquisite craft never forgets the errand: she raises the dead and offers full tribute and salve for those of us who have survived it."--TJ Jarrett, author of Ain't No Grave


"Hive is a joyride in a fast car that sometimes gets pulled over by a man in a suit with a Bible in his hand. Read these poems and you'll know what I'm talking about!"--Lucia Perillo, Brittingham Prize judge


"Christina Stoddard's stunning first collection begins in ruin and the buzz of gathering flies. And that buzz grows into a more and more menacing hum in a journey through rapes and murders, through stray bullets and serial killers, through mental and physical and emotional and sexual and even spiritual abuse until the voice speaking the poems seems to come from a 'mouth / fill[ed] with swarm.' Yet in the end, miraculously--by their sheer courageous existence--these fierce poems soothe as much as they sting."--Dan Albergotti, author of Millennial Teeth

From the Publisher