“The wrenching and intimate second collection from Hoffman […] lands as a multifaceted and meditative look at the lasting powers of memory.”
“Carlie Hoffman’s When There Was Light expands on the sparse and haunting lyricism of her 2021 debut, This Alaska. Here she investigates her parents’ '“Stammbaum, my bloodline,” saying, “I need to know about the ship / that carried my bone math […].” — Reviewed by Rebecca Morgan Frank for Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Books
“Hoffman thinks in poetry and the metaphoric drive of the poems shows a devotion to attention in a space of invisible difference, part of an unseen community, moving in and out of fixed definitions.” —National Jewish Book Award Judges’ Citation
Photograph by Andrew S. Gray
“Reading her poems is a little like learning a foreign language. One resists the new interactions between words, then grows accustomed to their strangeness and luxuriates in their surprising beauty.” —Jewish Book Council
“Her poems are glorious and subtle, slowly weaving the tapestry of her history as the granddaughter of Russian and Polish immigrants […] like many first- or second-generation Americans, Hoffman is overflowing with questions about her people’s past, desperate for a connection to their roots.” —Poetry Foundation’s Library Book Pick
“Hoffman shows that poetry “‘has always been a way towards truth.’” —Tupelo Quarterly
“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
“I am in awe of the way in which in Carlie Hoffman’s poetry image and word espouse themselves, braid each other into not a surrealist image, but into what Jerome Rothenberg once called a "deep image." This comes from a very clear-eyed, deep-eared stillness she is able to work from even if or when at the center of this / her world’s turmoil. Or as she puts it, "Girl at the threshold / catching the light with her hands." This is quest-writing, the quest of poetry, so well laid out in these lines: "There must be a word for the lack / of words for the things we have felt all / our lives, but couldn't name." PIERRE JORIS