One More World Like This World

Hoffman’s beautifully crafted third collection (after When There Was Light) savors the everyday and grasps the ineffable with a tone that easily includes the quotidian alongside the mythological and the historical. Hoffman’s titles are outstanding, and her metaphors are often wry (“The world can be the saddest fish tank,” from the poem “Reading Virginia Woolf in a Women in Literature Class at Bergen Community College”) or devastating (“The apple’s a for-sale sign swaying from the tree,” from “Borges Sells Me the Apple, Sells Me the World”). In Hoffman’s poems, mythology illuminates the timelessness of female oppression. She excels at providing vivid details that capture the varied experiences and hardships faced by women, from Eurydice’s “boring /underwear” in the poem “The Townspeople Contemplate Eurydice” to a friend in high school “bleeding in the parking lot” in “Rose Ausländer, Jane Roe, & Me”. Throughout, Hoffman grapples eloquently with contemporary tragedy and sadness while pushing past silence. It’s a wise and moving volume. (Mar.)