When There Was Light
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
While Hoffman’s debut collection interrogated the mythos built around grief, inhabiting an Alaska of the mind, her stunning sophomore collection When There Was Light looks at the past for what it was.These poems map out a topography where global movements of diaspora and war live alongside personal reckonings: a house’s foreclosure, parents’ divorce, the indelible night spent drunk with a best friend “[lying] down inside a chronic row of corn.” Here, her father’s voice “is the stray dog barking / at the snow, believing the little strawberries grow wilder / against a field.” In these pages, she points to Russia and Poland and Germany, saying, “It was / another time. My people / another time. The synagogues burn decades / of new snow.” The brilliance of this collection illuminates the relationship between memory and language; “another time” means different, back then, gone and lost to us, and it means over and over, always, again. With this linguistic dexterity and lyrical tenderness, Hoffman’s work bridges private and public histories, reminding us of the years cloaked in shadows and the years when there was light.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The wrenching and intimate second collection from Hoffman (after This Alaska) is rich with tight, lyrical poems that consider difficult subjects, such as mental health ("the gene/ of neuroticism that gorges/ on a mind") and declining physical health ("The blood/ in his heart is leaking as though/ blood is water sliding slowly/ down the spine from wet hair/ after plunging in a cold and gleaming/ stream when he was just a boy"), antisemitism, alcoholism, and the daily struggle to name what cannot be named ("There must be a word for the lack/ of words for the things we have felt all/ our lives, but couldn't name"). Silence in its many forms ("Did my family ever/ speak to one another" and "in this world I imagine/ my dead cousins dancing in a landscape") is challenged. There is also defiance in these pages ("You've watched her, dead/ center of the cornfield,/ and it can't be taken,/ her body bold/ with moonlight, laid bare"). It lands as a multifaceted and meditative look at the lasting powers of memory.
