Saturation Project by Christine Hume (review)

Christine Hume published Saturation Project, a lyric memoir, at the beginning of 2021 with Solid Objects. It feels like an appropriate book for a press called Solid Objects. The design of the Saturation Project and the structure of the work inside have qualities of tangibility—it feels holdable, turn-overable, in your hands, an artifact.

The work asks the reader to reread as well as read. In and of itself the book functions through rereading. We, the readers, may know that "Solid Objects" is also the title of a short story by Virginia Woolf.

The illustration on the cover of Saturation Project is reminiscent of the cover of Woolf's The Waves, and Hume's book feels equally saturated and saturating. Poetic and lyric, recursive and episodic, erudite and expansive. Powerful like the surging waves. Powerful enough to hear the hum and whoosh of the waves before you turn the corner to see the sea.

Saturation Project's cover illustration is Red Sea, by Andy Mister, and is an illustration of a sea, waves meeting, and foam. Mister is such a good name for the artist of this illustration. One can imagine the ocean mist resulting from splashing and waves meeting full force, each other or the shore.

Structure-wise, form-wise, Saturation Project is a triptych. Each of the three parts feels like it could stand alone (in fact, a version of "Atalanta: An Anatomy" was published by Essay Press in 2016). The memoir's three pieces or chapters are called "Atalanta: An Anatomy," "Hum," and "Ventifacts."

The reader may pick up on the feeling of saturation right away, in the "let there be light" moment, in the primordial chaotic stirring happening in the italicized section at the beginning of the first part, "Atalanta: An Anatomy." There are instructions in italics for the reader: "Turn back and dig. Dig past the wine-dark dirt, past shadows poisoning the apple tree. Dig until you find a baby bathed in the blood of a handsome dog."

The reader notices redness, the allusion to the mythological wine-dark sea, the allusion to the apple tree of Eden, the image of dog blood on a baby as in some sort of cultural rites. The reader is soaked to the bone, it is a dense wash of red, of myth, religion, life. Sites saturated violence, memory, survival.

This small section sets the situated matter of the whole book, all three pieces of the triptych, at the violent genesis of something. In the myth of Atalanta and in this coinciding section of Saturation Project we see centaurs and rape; childhood; myth (reappropriations of myth tend to function analogically with the genesis of Western art/culture/civilization); cycling and retelling; the vibrancy of red; ancient caves; sound; wind; survival. And it all feels somewhat suspiciously saturated in analogy. When the images or like-images start to cycle the reader may try to strike out specific connections and meaning, but meaning comes more from the saturation of images and like-images. In "Atalanta: An Anatomy" there's bears, myth, survival, trauma. In "Hum," there's sound, pollution, the animacy of inanimate (solid) objects. In "Ventifacts" there's wind, traveling, conception, sky. And throughout each of the pieces there's the mother, daughter, childhood, life, the body, violence, displacement, and learning.

Saturation functions via recollection, retelling, and recognition.

For example, in "Atalanta: An Anatomy" the reader might move through sections of text that retell, re-place, re-locate, myth and legend in geographically and physically and historically different spaces. There is something cyclical about the writing and content of this section—even the portions of text are separated by a symbol with six points that looks more like a swirling, a cyclone from above, than it does a snowflake. And the cyclone alludes to the effect of the blurring and blending of Hume's poetic and lyrical prose. She writes at the end of "Atalanta: An Anatomy": "I watch Atalanta blur into...