Like Stardust in the Peat Moss

By Alicia Hoffman

Light, take us beyond/this ordinary day reads the opening line, and it's an invitation as much as an invocation. In these mysterious, musical, and compelling poems, Alicia Hoffman makes the reader see differently, makes us rediscover the strangeness of what we know. Ranging from Pennsylvania to Alaska to Costa Rica to Spain, she restores natural magic to the large and ordinary world, where Earth tilts,/blooms sun, where doomed teenage lovers can say, I love you/ like salt. She understands artifice, its necessity and its deceptions, in emotion as well as in art. Her language is itself a wonderful discovery. Like the woman in "Self-Portrait," She balances marbles - round/ orbs of words - on her tongue and bites. The risk of pain accompanies every pleasure. There are many rewards, such as a sharply tender memory of peeling paint stained skin from her workingman father's back: like old veneer, the outer/albumen of egg or the riveting mediation on loss, "A Forgotten Song," which begins with a funeral and ends with survival, the "vertigo of standing," feet on the Atlantic shore, as the tide comes and recedes/ the sand from underneath like a magician's table/cloth trick. Voila. Hoffman walks the reader down this dizzying tightrope with her, enticed by visions, refusing to give in to them, persistently pitting literature against its own easy conventions. These poems celebrate the difficult. They trace the complexities of the heart, what could be within what and neither yields: give/praise/for/such/mirac/ulous/enjamb/ment the poet tells us. This is a book of marvelous and hard-won praise. ~ Stan Sanvel Rubin

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0615852645
• ISBN13: 9780615852645
• Release Date: September 2013
• Publisher: Aldrich Press
• Length: 92 Pages
• Weight: 0.42 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.2" x 6.0"