Shey Marque frames her 2025 collection, The Hum Hearers, as an exploration of epigenetic inheritance and so it is unsurprising that I come away with a desire to reach within myself, to, as Marque puts it in ‘Tracings’, “reach into [my] chromosomes and touch them in that intrinsic place where they rattle off a list of instructions left behind by generations long gone” (22). I will understand myself better if I can translate all my code. I want to know everything, though I understand that this knowledge exists, fully formed and inaccessible to me, in every cell of my body. Just as there is this paradox of knowledge in the collection, there is also a paradox of undoing – resorption, reversal, resurrection and return run parallel to ideas of persistence. In ‘Inhabiting the tesseract’, Marque says that “We are entangled, she & I, the way in which nothing really dies, woven into the same fabric of the next dimension” (21). Memory persists unseen like a daughter’s ova forming in her mother’s womb. Body holding body, something eternal, or, at least, enduring, remains within the other – death does not have to be death because she is alive, somewhere. Nothing really dies, and in ‘Out of Failing Bodies’ Marque considers a copy of her DNA, frozen in a test tube, as a means of reappearance: “I’ll no longer know my limit, or what dying means” (20). This hints at a central concern of the collection: to examine ontologies shaped by scientific advancement, both as it relates to our expanded understanding of how we came to be and what we carry with us, as well as how we might live on, wanting “nothing other than to say don’t forget me, don’t forget me” (22).

The image of pregnancy recurs throughout The Hum Hearers. The opening poem, ‘Unberthed’, concludes with a scene from the birthing suite, in which a mother notices a spiderweb above her and hopes the spider does not fall on her baby. Elsewhere, there are pregnancies that do not end in birth or life. In ‘Untimely Fruit’, there are “practised controlled falls down a flight of stairs” (6), there are decisions made about the body, the body holding body, and great certainties within silences. In ‘Where fragile things meet ordinary air’, there is “a breathless, blue baby wrapped warm in a blanket” who “went quietly” (66). Everywhere in the collection, intricacies are contained within other, larger and often more legible, things – not only the embryo contained inside the uterus, but also “the turning / wheel of the universe” that is DNA in a cell (‘Poetic Constellations: An Exploded-Sonnet Sequence’, 83), the unsaid in ‘the blade, the broom, the banging’ (‘F(l)ight’, 34) or “this little world inside a world inside a world” (‘Kandinskyesque’, 23). Because of this, when the foetus appears stillborn and outside the body, it is a subversion of the familiar image, a disruption of natural order at the epicentre of grief, simultaneously highlighting the inextricability between the complex, ambiguous ‘within’ and the frank, answered ‘outside’. An image of the embryo being returned to the body in ‘Shooting Cloud at a Sky’, “the resorption of three hundred soft bones, and the shrinking tails of incipients that never were. Forgive me” (14), has remained with me. I wonder why we ask for forgiveness in the larger schema of endurance, given that some element of the incipients necessarily remains. But I understand that the incipients are not preserved whole. More than this, I understand that it is difficult to be a woman who leaves, it is difficult to be a woman who runs early.

I too am a woman who runs away. Another paradox, then, of intimacy and distance, another duality of ambiguity and answer. The speaker has inherited the compounded unsaid, and when she leaves, Marque says, “I know how I’m marked, how I can vanish” (‘Instinction’, 4). This is an impulse that cannot be ignored. The path to escape must be clear and open. The urge toward disappearance relates not only to being with others but to being in the body. Marque dedicates ‘If a Flower Could be Called a Waif’ to her foremother Sarah Green, and navigates Green’s beauty as inextricable from her illness, tuberculosis having shaped aesthetic standards toward pallor, dilated eyes, flushed lips and a vulnerable thinness. In parallel, Marque has her own perseverant hunger, making a distinction between the body and the self: “My body no longer wants me to eat” (16). Even with medical intervention, she “can’t yet shake this tag” (16) from her cells. Everything has been inherited, every cell contains the code directing every function in the body, yet the ‘I’ and the ‘me’ of the poem speaks from a position beyond corporeality. The body wants to disappear, as bodies before it have. A convergence of desires: a desire to be beautiful in the ways the women before her were beautiful, a desire to be beautiful in the way that is expected of a woman today, a view of these standards as flowing from the same origin, a desire to palpate the body and see where the self lives, or see if it is hovering above, or if it is the sum of the body and something else, a desire to know if we can leave aspects of the body behind, and we return back to the desire to run away.

Pluripotent afterlives hum along the breadth of this work. In the perfect volta to ‘Afterlife of a Housecoat’, a poem following her mother’s death, Marque evokes the resurrection of Osiris in the desire to “tear [the housecoat] into fourteen / pieces & fling them over fields, / its printed flowers, like little blue gods / ever resurrecting amid the growing corn” (61). Death is not death but transformation. As Marque states in ‘Every atom that was you’: “your energy has not left us, no” rather, “right away there’s something new assembling”. Our molecules – unformed, formed, unformed once more – will take on new ways of being. We outlive ourselves. In the introduction, Marque considers whether memories “not yet recovered” from her mother may be residing somewhere within herself. Throughout The Hum Hearers, it is clear to me that Marque’s every foremother has found an afterlife in her body. There may be no knowable, discrete place where foremothers take up their residence inside a body, yet their presence suffuses every cell. Woman holding woman, body holding body, memory holding memory, universe holding universe.