Following When There Was Light (Winner of the 2023 National Jewish Book Award in Poetry), Carlie Hoffman’s third collection of poetry, One More World like This World, is a lyrical study of contemporary life—its lines echo amidst the imbalanced interdependence of globalization, in the wake of third-wave feminism, and from the active collapse of our American empire. Hoffman’s poems brilliantly survey both how women have been flattened, misunderstood, and displaced throughout time and across disciplines, and how women have made themselves at home in their minds and within their specific histories.
Approaching adaptation as a coping mechanism against perpetual exile, Hoffman recasts female archetypes as contemporary women, drawing a throughline between the narrative past and present circumstances. Persephone follows her captor "deeper inside the replica of girlhood," and Eurydice in New Jersey "knew where she was going" as she made her way to death across "the parking lot and graveyard’s / fertile grass." Rather than simply retelling a familiar tale, Hoffman’s poems illuminate mythology as a discourse with time and recognize solidarity between women as a conversation that continues beyond the grave.
The timeless wisdom of this collection is how it unveils the constant and concurrent tragedies taking place everywhere around us while salvaging the irreducible pleasure of living from the wrecks of perception. Despite it all, we want to live. Perhaps, Hoffman seems to say, we were expelled from the garden not once but again and again, and, each time we exit, we go out searching for one more world like this world. "The apple’s a for-sale sign swaying from the tree," she writes in the collection’s final poem "Borges Sells Me the Apple, Sells Me the World." Or, to revisit the stage set in "Teaching the Persona Poem at Ramapo College of New Jersey," "Outside the classroom window, snow falls, unencumbered / by a wind from nowhere the night Eurydice chooses to stay."