Description: Like the best songs, Julie Choffel's The Inevitable Return of What We Do Not Love is a poem fueled by desire. To have "so many / ways to say I want" is dangerous and selfish, we've heard: we should be content; we should be grateful. But "women are never / not hungry," Choffel's mother-speaker insists, aware that her life plays out as two tracks in the same song-the material world of meals and routines as well as the imaginative realm. Poetry is this "parallel universe," these "other zones," this "floor / under the garbage," these subterranean places where we meet to tend to different hungers. In Choffel's hands, these spaces bloom with deep seeing and wry humor: "there I go / again trying to liberate us from what we don't know." The poem becomes a vehicle for satisfying its own longings, a gift then passed along to us as readers-so that we, too, might dance to such a soundtrack in our kitchens and in the otherworlds that envelop the everyday. If you're willing to risk being brought back to your own desires, enter The Inevitable Return.
-Becca Klaver
Brief description: Julie Choffel is the author of the The Hello Delay (Fordham, 2012) and winner of the Poets Out Loud prize. Her poems can be found in New American Writing, Posit, Orion, Barrow Street, Interim, Salamander, and the tiny, among other places. Originally from Austin, Texas, she currently lives near Hartford and teaches at the University of Connecticut.