Writing alum Carlie Hoffman ’16 published her third book of poetry, One More World Like This World, with Four Way Books in March.
The book follows When There Was Light, which was awarded a 2024 National Jewish Book Award. “I read, write, practice to develop my own voice as a poet further with each book,” Hoffman said.
One More World Like This World was named a “Title To Watch” by Library Journal, where critic Barbara Hoffert said that the volume “brims with the dissociation wrought by contemporary life.” This tension is palpable in “Panorama After Foreclosure/After Federico García Lorca and Yehuda Amichai,” a poem featured by the publisher:
I used to think it could be solved this way:
like birds huddled above the U-Haul
along the branch rusting through
its green roof. Skycreatures. Balloon
on the house. My mother shrieks
in the garden. The snake
nude against the light. Here: I give you
my feathers—and here are all
my clouds, the volcano’s intimacy—
but the birds aren’t ready
to be oxen again, the mountain matted
with Sisyphus’ sweat. Always the disdainful
shelves of fruit, which is history. The engine
shivers. The dead stay dead.
One More World Like This World was also praised by Publisher’s Weekly. “Throughout, Hoffman grapples eloquently with contemporary tragedy and sadness while pushing past silence. It’s a wise and moving volume,” the magazine said in their review.
Hoffman is inspired by poetry itself, as orchid grower Amado Vasquez is inspired by the flowers in Joan Didion’s “Quiet Days in Malibu.” Hoffman quoted an exchange between Didion and Vasquez: “It seems to me that day I had never talked to anyone so direct and unembarrassed about the things he loved,” wrote Didion in response to Vasquez, who told her “You want to know how I feel about the plants [...] I will die in orchids.”
“I share in Vazquez's feeling he has for the orchids about poetry,” Hoffman said. “This is the way poetry is intrinsic to my life and how the poems in the book connect—a devotion to language, music of poetry, the deep image; how to say in words what is ultimately ineffable.”
Carlie Hoffman is the author of When There Was Light (Four Way Books, 2023) and This Alaska (Four Way Books, 2021), winner of the NCPA Gold Award in poetry and a finalist for the Foreword Indies Book of the Year Award. A poet and translator, her honors include a “Discovery” / Boston Review prize and a Poet’s & Writers Amy Award. Carlie is the founder and editor-in-chief of Small Orange Journal.
