“Carlie Hoffman’s poems see pain, danger, regret, remorse, mercy in ways other documentation cannot. Sometimes a balm, other times a warning, often a record, most often all at once. Here is how Hoffman opens a few poems: "February, worst month, The last time, When I was suffering, I’ve lost you again, It seems to me a blessing, Every season is good for killing girls." Hoffman’s poems accept their fierce conflicts and struggle. Her reaching for a way to say in words never ends. Near the book’s end Hoffman asks a question. "Will I ever stop being angry / for never hearing my family’s language?" Imagine how many ways to take that question. In another poem Hoffman says, "Somehow, American," and it sums up an almost unbearable too much. This is a beautiful book, willing to look with love, the kind poetry provides, deep into what our families do and mean to us, what they give us, what they take away.” DARA BARROIS/DIXON

"It's important to walk like this: through the places where the vanished people of our lives have walked," writes Carlie Hoffman in her astonishing new collection, When There Was Light. In poems resounding with absence and loss, Hoffman journeys through Poland and Germany to a farm in upstate New York to investigate her roots — roots shattered by war, displacement and 'the violet, ancient noise' of a family’s silence. In image after throat-grabbing image, she makes the damage to successive generations visceral. A photo album glows "like a severed shoulder of a man." Of the languages lost to her, she writes, "my beheaded tongue Hebrew tongue Russian tongue I comprehend nothing…" When There Was Light is a deeply moving personal reckoning. But its themes are universal: history, memory, identity, the struggle to understand our lives. "The world has so many rooms," she writes, "it's impossible to pinpoint where mine begins." ELLEN BASS

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“When you die you go to This Alaska. When you’re raised from the dead you’re raised by the memory of song and you will go searching for This Alaska. It is a book of heaven that has not forgotten the body nor the shadow cast by the body, nor how hunger leads you to the slaughterhouse and is love.” JOSH BELL

“This Alaska abounds with birds. Grackles, herons, pigeons, crows, and oil-slick seagulls reveal the heartless beauty of nature and the social Darwinism of civilization. Joseph Brodsky wrote that when one encounters a bird in a poem, chances are that the bird is actually the poet. Hoffman’s birds scrounge, suffer, die and get buried, but they also rise up like a magnificent heron, ‘so blue and big and saintlike.’ Carlie Hoffman’s debut collection is excruciating and glorious and true.” BINNIE KIRSHENBAUM

“As I read this collection of poetry, I am at once struck by how Carlie seems to know exactly my current situation, how the poems are also pushing against what Michigan and politics insist on right now, a dilution of compassion such that even using the word rings hollow, even light getting lost so that incessant winter becomes the singular season—and even grace disgusts. Carlie offers the true ending of a year, so even that we have gotten incorrect. I return to the poems, seeking what has led us astray, carnival danger leaps out, everything for sale, constant urging to try your luck, for even the dead come into houses, not funeral homes, for I get the feeling that most occupancy is dead to really feeling, dead to possibilities of healing, and this state is delivered in beautiful language of the hope Carlie’s poems offer: soothing cadences of words revealing seldom spoken truths, and that is the actual hope that Carlie identifies, for we must do more than merely hope and dream. For in the end, hopes and dreams are small engines that do not power the cages away.” THYLIAS MOSS