Fire Series - (Pitt Poetry) by Kelly Hoffer (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

In Fire Series, Kelly Hoffer writes 'pain's language is, / wretchedly, available to us.' And Hoffer also--brilliantly, deftly--summons forth the diction and syntax of other emotional and intellectual states. The language raves, huffs, trills, stutters, and scrutinizes. Interiority is tangible, dynamic. I was also awestruck by the book's structure: it, too, has its own grammar. These are inventive and indelible poems.--Eduardo Corral, author of Guillotine

Kelly Hoffer's Fire Series is an unruly, yet often elegant, set of variations on poetic combustibility. Cause and effect, transposed into language and reference--or maybe it's the other way around--run up to and alongside the firebreak trails of landscapes and mindscapes alike. Fiery transfiguration is more than ever now the condition for life, for relation, for creativity. Fire Series inhabits this condition with zeal, an almost religious commitment to its terms for poesis as recombinant metamorphosis. Hoffer plays simultaneously on sound and vision, offers irruptions of slashes (in multiple senses) that tease decoding, and yokes erotics uncomfortably yet deliciously to morality. The most beautiful page in the book scatters into ash then ends with two words that trap us dancing between desire and grief.--Jennifer Nelson, author of Civilization Makes Me Lonely

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.--Divya Victor, author of CURB

About the Author

Kelly Hoffer is a poet and book artist. Her debut collection of poetry, Undershore, was the winner of the Lightscatter Press Prize. Her chapbook, the photo I don't write about, was a Tilted House Netsuke Micro Series selection. Her poetry was recognized as a finalist for the National Poetry Series in both 2020 and 2021. She is Helen Zell Visiting Professor in Poetry at the University of Michigan.