UNDERSHORE is out!
UNDERSHORE (May 2023) is my first book of poems. It was selected by Diana Khoi Nguyen as the winner of the 2021 Lightscatter Press Prize.
Lightscatter Press publishes books that trigger multiple acts and sites of reading, a model that they articulate as the book and, or the book plus: the book is comprised of both a textual artifact and multimedia experiences that expand the worlds in which the reader can encounter the poems.
To accompany the book, I constructed a paper quilt of cyanotype-printed squares that draw on language from the poems. See examples of these prints here, or visit the app that documents the quilt and listen to recordings of the poems here.
reviews of UNDERSHORE
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“…you could say Hoffer’s collection is quilt-like: precisely crafted, intimate. Each square a poem, the collection a blanket. But while these similarities are evident, Hoffer’s book is less domestic and more unsettling than a quilt.” —Olivia Durif
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“…these poems feel like equal part pelage and pottage, an outer and inner warmth, at turns what holds us in the bracing cold and what nourishes us in hunger. While the intimacy of this approach is familiar is still refutes simple explication.” — David Joez Villaverde
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“… rich in media and rich with resonance…The central mystery of these poems lies in this question: how does a person continue to mark the world despite having left it?” — Lindsey Webb
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conversations about UNDERSHORE
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“When definitions build up in a poem, the poem asks to be continually redefined, reconsidered, or even undone completely.” — Kelly Hoffer
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"Could you speak more to your approach to repetition in your work? Doubling and doubling that has gone askew?"—Aishvarya Arora
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"Poems show the topsy-turvy nature of grief in that the poet has to make new sense of the world... What sort of balance between physical and emotional places do these poems find? " —Martha Stuit
Some nice things wonderful poets have said about the book—
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Diana Khoi Nguyen
“UNDERSHORE is incandescent, like an electric light housing a filament which glows when a current passes through it. A filament as tender and tenacious as spider silk weathering the elements. Its lyrical adroitness is immediately felt and heard… After a death comes a ‘disrupted texture,’ but in mapping the body with the natural world, the speaker finds a way to move forward, as clouds are never not moving, as plants continue to grow toward the sun, until the day that they don't. Never will I forget this speaker: ‘try to shape my mouth a poppy /ringed with dew, my neck a greening nape. I come / off inelegant—something borrowed, something / burrowed. unseemly. lustering.’ Yet in these vulnerable admissions of self, and statements of sheer longing, the poet's sightline is unerringly honest, seeking, and true.”
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Elizabeth Willis
“The edges in Kelly Hoffer’s vibrant poems are sharpened with delight: ‘the neon crocus / knocks your skirt up’! This stunning debut collection brims with the physicality of desire and loss as it tracks the complex imprints and entanglements of embodied experience. Attending to both the disorientation and anchoring of conscious life, these poems reverberate with emergent realities: the felt properties of the bloom, the apparition, the lush shores and ledges of evolutionary knowledge, even the shifting cusps of denotative meaning that rise and fall through the pages of the dictionary. The afterlife of each felt space opens up a vivid inner elsewhere that locates us right here, in the fiery light of ‘the un- /dead side of the river.’”
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Prageeta Sharma
“Kelly Hoffer’s arresting and lyric collection UNDERSHORE explores how to write about loss and living with ‘linelush’ precision. Among these poems mapping the grieving process of a daughter’s loss of her mother is a poignancy of how she writes about suffering clearly and philosophically. The poems declare what they want, their desires mark the scenery and the interiority behind or under ground, sky, and water, grasping dearly how ‘a hovering void,’ becomes a site at which the speaker’s comprehension connects to a ‘truer deep.’ This collection is full of capacious wisdom, needed turnings of insight so hard to find elsewhere. I hold this book tight.”
book-related ephemera
I love working with other artists and poets. Two of the poems from the book have been turned into letter-pressed broadsides. One printed by Kate Gibbel at Send Me Press and one printed by Margaret Yapp at Prompt Press. Click below to see more and order a broadside for yourself.
about the cover
The cover image is a cyanotype of a piece of kelp from Anna Atkin’s 1843 Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions—widely considered the first book illustrated with photographic images. Cover design by Kayden B. Groves and Jem Ashton.
