Description: 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: 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