1 of 2 copies available
1 of 2 copies available
Approaching adaptation as a coping mechanism against perpetual exile, Hoffman recasts female archetypes as contemporary women, drawing a throughline between the narrative past and present circumstances. Persephone follows her captor "deeper inside the replica of girlhood," and Eurydice in New Jersey "knew where she was going" as she made her way to death across "the parking lot and graveyard's / fertile grass." Rather than simply retelling a familiar tale, Hoffman's poems illuminate mythology as a discourse with time and recognize solidarity between women as a conversation that continues beyond the grave.
The timeless wisdom of this collection is how it unveils the constant and concurrent tragedies taking place everywhere around us while salvaging the irreducible pleasure of living from the wrecks of perception. Despite it all, we want to live. Perhaps, Hoffman seems to say, we were expelled from the garden not once but again and again, and, each time we exit, we go out searching for one more world like this world. "The apple's a for-sale sign swaying from the tree," she writes in the collection's final poem "Borges Sells Me the Apple, Sells Me the World." Or, to revisit the stage set in "Teaching the Persona Poem at Ramapo College of New Jersey," "Outside the classroom window, snow falls, unencumbered / by a wind from nowhere the night Eurydice chooses to stay."
-
Creators
-
Publisher
-
Release date
March 15, 2025 -
Formats
-
Kindle Book
-
OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781961897298
-
EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781961897298
- File size: 544 KB
-
-
Languages
- English
Loading
Why is availability limited?
×Availability can change throughout the month based on the library's budget. You can still place a hold on the title, and your hold will be automatically filled as soon as the title is available again.
The Kindle Book format for this title is not supported on:
×Read-along ebook
×The OverDrive Read format of this ebook has professional narration that plays while you read in your browser. Learn more here.