When There Was Light

Carlie Hoffman’s When There Was Light expands on the sparse and haunting lyricism of her 2021 debut, This Alaska. Here she investigates her parents’ “Stammbaum, my bloodline,” saying, “I need to know about the ship / that carried my bone math […].” 

Hoffman’s long-lined, voice-driven titles tend to establish the occasion of the poem before giving way to contrasting lyricism, as in “When Waitressing at the Kosher Restaurant a Man Calls Me a Whore and a Woman Rushes Behind Me into the Kitchen to Hand Me Her Baby,” which begins: “Every season is good for killing girls, / the seaweed-black night foaming // with stars–.” The poem “Sundown, Looking at My Estranged Cousin’s Yearbook Picture and All the Damage Done,” opens with, “No moon tonight but the white bells of a woman’s / eyes squinting tacitly toward a camera,” and comes further back down to earth with “a spring evening that stings like the elegy // of lifting a woman’s hair from the shower drain, dredged deep.”

Hoffman excels when she cedes narrative to metaphor, and when the mother figure emerges, such as in the extended conceit of the taut “Give the Lake a Moment to Speak About the Horses”:

I have a heart. It is full
  of horses. My mother’s

heart, the horses.
  In the lake’s center,

rain breathes down.
  Someone lies bedridden.

Or elsewhere:  

Your mother is a person you try
jumping in the same way you would
glassy stream,
only to find it frozen.

The narrator’s observations fluctuate between the existential, the quotidian, and the ancestral, drawing on newspaper accounts of her family’s immigration and responding to various poets, including, in a moving elegy, a young cousin of Paul Celan’s who died in a Nazi labor camp.

At the center is the speaker, wrestling with both generational trauma and the world around her. “[P]igs hang by their ankles,” opens “End of February at the Market, After a Panic Attack,” which closes with the speaker wondering:

[…] how can I sleep
knowing they’re out there
awake all night, mouths wide open.