Description:
This sonically lush poetry debut, which grieves the loss of a parent, is one of intimate encounter--between the living and the dead, between one lover and another, between a word's definition and its lyric resonance, between poetic line and the natural world.
Brief description:
Kelly Hoffer is a poet and book artist. Her poetry was recognized as a finalist for the National Poetry Series in both 2020 and 2021. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and a PhD in Literatures in English from Cornell University. She currently teaches in the MFA program at the University of Michigan as the Helen Zell Visiting Professor in Poetry.
Review Quotes: "One of Anna Atkins's cyanotypes wraps around the cover of Kelly Hoffer's UNDERSHORE. Amongst Hoffer's poems are QR codes--looking themselves like dappled shadows--leading to images of cyanotype squares, also made by the poet. Hoffer's cyanotypes contain botanical prints of her own, alongside scraps of language, and squares and triangles of shadow. Viewed as a group, each square suggests traditional quilt block patterns--fittingly, these cyanotypes were sewn into a paper quilt that Hoffer brought along on many stops of her book tour. UNDERSHORE, as you can perhaps already imagine, is rich in media and rich with resonance. The lines between material and ineffable things--between shadow and object, light and paper, breath and fabric, digital and material, needle and paper--slip and hitch throughout the collection, and I am left with the lingering impression of, well, impressions. The acts of pressing, imprinting, shadowing, and piercing recur across the poems, mirrored in their visual supplements. In UNDERSHORE, many threads are available for pulling. Here, the one I've picked up is the sequence of poems each entitled 'Visitation, ' which are scattered throughout the expansive collection. The 'Visitation' poems narrate appearances, across dreams and half-memories, of the speaker's mother, who is dead. It is as if these poems, too, are attempting to record a shadow."-- "PromptPress.org"