Fire Series

Reading Kelly Hoffer’s Fire Series, I am reminded that Anne Carson, a poet as attentive to contradiction wrought within a feeling as Hoffer is, once declared in an interview: ‘If prose is a house, poetry is a man on fire running quite fast through it.’ And verse, as printing traditions go, is the field slashed and furrowed for that human life fleeing a feeling only to meet it at the exit of an expression. Composed as curious and patient acts of devotion, Hoffer’s poems are evidence for how she has remained interested in her own grieving as a way of attending another’s, and as a way of practicing the life-long arc of witness for the loss of both language and love that we all must learn. ‘How,’ she asks, ‘do I protect my mother from my lyric tendency?’ This is a collection that frets between mute grief and vociferous, feral desire to envision these not only as adventures of cognition and the nervous system, but also as gauntlets thrown to a feckless language that betrays us at the slightest provocation. Hoffer has turned, here, an ear to those wailing sounds of weeping and ecstasy until they combust into music. Fire Series is ablaze with lyrical demonstrations that a thought can only warm us if it flickers between certainty and doubt.