ONE MORE WORLD LIKE THIS WORLD
PREORDER (March 15, 2025)
Four Way Books, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Book Culture
“Carlie Hoffman’s One More World Like This World brims with the dissociation wrought by contemporary life.”
Cover image: Helen Frankenthaler, Sesame
Wise beyond her years, Carlie Hoffman’s One More World Like This World resonates with experience, emotion, and acute prosodic and poetic intelligence, without ever wearing any of it on her proverbial sleeve. Though the landscape has gotten ever more bedraggled, Doctor Williams would have easily recognized the diners, parking lots, and for-sale signs dotting the terrain of these poems. And Jack Spicer would have understood exactly why Eurydice shows up. As so much that comes to us now feels ready-made, there is a resilience and clarity in Hoffman’s work that is all too rare and warrants our close attention.
—Ammiel Alcalay
Carlie Hoffman’s powerful One More World Like This World may open with a poem expressing a desire for home, but what makes this collection both poignant and unique is its restive lack of one. This fraught condition has been an ongoing concern in Hoffman’s work: “How I have // no place, but this small oracle, ash // from the synagogues, a gust of wind // ruffling the sheaves of paper.” A song filled with shadows is the ephemeral location that her poems create as they hover between past and present, between material labor and spiritual yearning. In this way, they depict a reality rooted in a quotidian made strange by history, myth, and Hoffman’s personal vision. One More World Like This World beautifully yet darkly rewards its reading.
—Alan Gilbert
Carlie Hoffman’s beautiful new collection is a book about language, translation, and grief. Also a book about prayer and myth. A book about ancestors. A book about girlhood and the body. A book about home. And a book about witnessing. As these poems grapple with war and grief and silence, I love how many other writers are in community here, from Amichai to Borges to Celan to Ausländer. Full of formal invention and surprise, Hoffman’s poems take us to Brooklyn, New Jersey, Europe, and Russia, then to the underworld and back. And these poems ask urgent questions: what is the role of language in the twentieth and twenty-first century? What work can poetry do in the world? One More World Like This World demands our attention.
—Nicole Cooley