Fire Series
Poems
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Fire is both destructive and regenerative; at times vengeful, at others cleansing. The first mention of fire in Genesis comes after Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden. In Greek mythology, Prometheus steals fire from the gods for humankind. Fire becomes metaphorically layered—as knowledge, as desire, as anger. The book entertains the many strands of this fiery lineage as it undertakes a poetic investigation into grief and sex, loneliness and restlessness within intimacy, and language’s ability to make, unmake, and remake things. Hoffer engages in questions of gender, anger, and nationality—how women are made subject to expectations of care and fidelity. How Americans are called into conflicts that defy sense, that defy humanist values. The voice is angry as she struggles with the limitations of her agency and further frustrated that “speaking directly” does not seem to furnish progress or power. The book, then, tries to speak otherwise—it moves sonically, associatively, obsessively.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The arresting visual poems in the sophomore collection from Hoffer (Undershore) play on the meaning of slash, a term for forest debris created by wind, logging, or fire. Beyond providing metaphorical kindling, the slash also appears as a punctuation mark arranged in different patterns, with or without text, like line and stanza breaks gone haywire. The poems draw power from the alternate meanings of words, even as their restless trajectories don't trust the medium: "when I write toward the world, I am pushed out of it.// fingering language's tether, I ask to be opened." Of her mother, she writes: "I fear my poems// about her death will replace her/ /." Fraught with cracks, spaces, separations, repetitions, and erasures, these poems explore the territory where language intersects with "real" life: "to end/ on an image is to avoid a decision yet here I stand/ still, in two streams, water collaring my ankles each/ prickling in its sensuous confusion." Motifs float tenuously here—a mother's death, aspects of fire, a sexual relationship that turns marital—and some progressions seem merely associative. Full of leaps and contradictions, this is an inventive and lyrical work. Correction: A previous version of this review misidentified the publisher.
