Frontenac House, 2008
Read by Jmae Barizo
This book is not about insects. A solitary six-legged creature does grace the cover however, and Karen Hofman’s debut collection seems to take a few lessons from water striders, which live on the surface of the water and need to push backward in order to generate forward motion. It is this “pushing backwards” that propels the book, which reads almost like a family narrative, chronicling the past with startling audacity.
Hofman’s poems are infused with a bona fide lyricism which emerges remarkably from often harrowing childhood scenes. Through her exploration of erasure and memory, the reader is faced with the absurdity of the human condition, though Hofman never writes of such abstractions; she rather graces the page with details such as “the way the hills, yellow in June, resemble the carcasses of camels” and “the car-alarm scent of the coyote, lifting his leg against a trunk”.
The tone of the poems, wavering between stringency and sentimentality, expound on subjects as varied as the female orgasm, Persephone, and the penis of a coyote. With unflinching elegance, Hofman surprises the reader with her seemingly fearless confrontations with mortality. In “Fructis Ventris” the narrator “sealed it in sterile jars. / They ferment now, on my cellar shelves, malignant siblings.” In “Cherries”, Hofman writes about “young fruit-pickers … savagely beaten,” ending the same poem with a reference to her sister’s “belly round, delicately veined and ripe to bursting.” It is such paired dichotomies that fuel the language, charging each poem with a type of dark and enigmatic sophistication.
Ironically, I lost interest in the few poems named after insects (“Damselfly”, “Mantis”, “Caddis Fly Larvae”, to name a few). Their literality paled to the longer poem which the first section is comprised of, entitled “Perk Test.” A percolation test is a method for determining soil suitability before one installs a septic field; it measures the ability for soil to absorb liquid. Written in finely crafted couplets, Hofman’s opens the reader to a remote and sensual world:
God is a barbed-wire fence over your shoulder.
A rosebriar stripped of its ruby fruit.
(Where has the young bear
gone, its tender paws, stained mouth?)
I sample a missed berry.
Its flesh furs my tongue.
