“Carlie Hoffman’s When There Was Light shows a mastery of thinking through language. The texture, subtlety and beauty of these poems are brought together through constant pressuring: questions of family, identity, loss, and shame. A family emigration from Germany to a farm in upstate New York shows the damage and consequence of seeking “the American dream” through assimilation and sacrifice. 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. Hoffman’s poems show her feeling of outsiderness in her body. She brings a feminist physicality to mysticism, as in “Kabbalah for Last November”: “You have always been the woman in the flooding / room, refusing to move out of the way.” She also wonders about intergenerational trauma, as in “Yahrzeit in December:” “tracing back the gene / of neuroticism that gorges / on a mind.” She goes deep into herself, to envelope and implicate it, to be in an in-between place, an exile, holding a hatchet to cut new trails in the cartography. When There Was Light adds to Jewish poetics not only in its subjects, but in its system of thought: an area of doubts, wishes, and possibilities.” — Sean Singer, Judges’ Citation
“The wrenching and intimate second collection from Hoffman […] lands as a multifaceted and meditative look at the lasting powers of memory.” — Publishers Weekly
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