Here, the hummingbird serves as a metaphoric emblem for the intricacies of queer, polyamorous relationships, much in the way mermaids have served as an emblem for portions of the trans community. Flum returns again and again to the iridescence and actions of the hummingbird (and other avian symbols), exploring a kind of prismatic partnership with a lover, her lover’s husband, and the speaker’s other lovers… Flum manages to make the reader an intimate outsider, rather than simply a voyeur, to relationships that do not fit the hegemonic definitions our heteronormative society puts forward. She has no need for exploitative exoticism, and her speaker is not exploring out of boredom but out of a deep calling to the deep. It is the book’s soulfulness that I admire. This is a collection about the soul-work of making a family, and how we can choose delight even when we’re not fully seen, fully recognized. Even as we are in a constant state of “becoming,” as Judith Butler suggests, we can still choose delight.

— Steven Leyva, The Washington Independent Review of Books

"I have never wanted to be mystified," Flum writes in one of the startlingly insightful prose works that support the volume's filigree, feathery, flightworthy verse, all hummingbird and hunger and momentum: these poems keep their hummingbird consciousness thoughtful, attentive, in motion, "almost flying," even as its fertilities and their impediments yoke it to our biologically complicated Earth. Can hummingbirds marry? Can they take multiple lovers? Human beings like this powerful poet can, and we do, and we need poems about that taking, and that giving, and those satisfactions, and those needs. Flum offers a starship, an aviary, a sanctuary in half-crowned sonnets and other rooms, durable, breathing, bruised. Ask permission first. Then come in. "Pick up what you need."

— Stephanie Burt, author of We Are Mermaids

Éluard says, “There is another world, and it is in this one.”  Liza Flum’s poems ask us to consider what might be proper figures for love the world declines to see. Perhaps birds? – the smallest ones and fastest, darting and head-butting, negotiating or imposing terms. And maybe the right form to express this love is the sonnet—in glorious multiple enactments—or the micro-essay?  In these poems, such creatures and forms emerge into their moments, shimmering with life and light.  As a new generation discovers not so much how to open and reconfigure love’s possibilities as how to imagine and enable the possibilities we have always had, Liza Flum’s gorgeous book wings onto the scene and hovers: quick and glimmering, fierce, iridescent.

— Katharine Coles, author of Ghost Apples

Hover is smart and it smarts—each poem lands like a dart into the cork of the mind and heart. Pinning ideas with forceps and form, the poet turns and upturns tradition in a kind of zoetrope, faster and faster, animating what was, only moments before, in singular rendering, still. Stillness (a momentary pause) and stillness (the endurance of a thing) makes this shimmering debut a distillation of nectar essential for those of us living in “bodies with wings.”

— Benjamin Garcia, author of Thrown in the Throat