THIS ALASKA
Winner of the Northern California Gold Award in Poetry
Finalist for the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award
Four Way Books, Indie Bound, Barnes & Noble, Book Shop, Amazon
“Beauty and violence coexist in Hoffman’s writing, drawing memorably from one another.”
“Over the years I've taken hundreds of photos of these birds but never managed to capture anything that I thought conveyed their quietness in flight. So, one morning from a kayak, I started experimenting with panning the camera in the direction the bird was flying.
I managed to get several decent images that morning but this one stood out. To me, the abstraction felt soft and quiet, just as the morning was.” —Photograph by Nicholas Bell, Bird in Flight
“[W]hat Carlie’s poems so often do — they transcend the seemingly simple act of noticing into something approaching astonishment.” —Ordinary Plots
“In her debut poetry collection, This Alaska, Carlie Hoffman maps a vast, sparsely populated, and glacial terrain, choosing this landscape as the place of her reckoning with her childhood, grief, suffering, love, and hope.” —Columbia Journal
“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