Fire Series

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. (Feb.)

Correction: A previous version of this review misidentified the publisher.