This Alaska

by Carlie Hoffman

Overview

To live in an Alaska of the mind is to map the imagined cartography of winter on all that is physical. To dwell perpetually in a symbolic cold, and to emerge, with grace, unscathed. This book questions what it means to live and love in such a buried season. This Alaska interrogates all that emotional and physical intimacy cannot salvage or keep warm. Death and dreams are at the very center of this book. But life — and all it entails and circles and loses and loves — is at its heart.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781945588921
Publisher:	Four Way Books
Publication date:	09/15/2021
Series:	Stahlecker Selections
Pages:	76
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Carlie Hoffman is a poet and translator from New Jersey. Her honors include a 92Y Discovery Prize and a Poets & Writers Amy Award. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Small Orange Journal. This Alaska is her first book. She lives in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

I Don’t Always Tell the Truth

Believe me when I tell you
our visions have lost

all meaning. This morning one came
like a stone dropped to the bottom

of a well. The solution for lightlessness
is going down there. To climb

into the dark like you know
what you are looking for.

In the same way I have forgotten
entire people, I am just now learning

the names for the furniture that
separates us. Sometimes sleep

is wicked; sometimes it’s a sparrow
driving its beak in dirt.

Table of Contents

I

Learning to be still 5

Alaska 5

I don't always tell the truth 7

Goat 8

Without centrifuge 9

Solstice 10

Dissociation 11

Winter 13

Hunting Lesson 14

Wishbone 15

Disposing the animal 17

Continuum 18

After burial 20

II

There is no doubt you are hemmed in by something not yet fixed 25

Alaska 26

Bloemenmarkt 28

Orion 29

Exoskeleton 30

Why I moved to New York 31

After the need to keep other worlds 32

To Brooklyn and part way back 34

Sudden hymn in winter 35

Riding home on tee 1 train at 5 am 37

Midnight Sun 38

Mime in anchorage station 39

Anniversary 40

Beyond the field 43

III

Postcard from Alaska 47

As for me, I used to be a bird 49

Sudden hymn in august 51

Disobedience 53

Scene at the central park zoo, late winter 54

North window 56

History 57

While waiting in Line at Lenox fish market, I imagine someplace else 58

The women of highbridge park 59

Night drive with my brother through warwick valley 61

Pact 65

Overnight 65

Editorial Reviews

This Alaska abounds with birds. Grackles, herons, pigeons, crows, and oil-slick seagulls reveal the heartless beauty of nature and the social Darwinism of civilization. Joseph Brodsky wrote that when one encounters a bird in a poem, chances are that the bird is actually the poet. Hoffman’s birds scrounge, suffer, die and get buried, but they also rise up like a magnificent heron, ‘so blue and big and saintlike.’
Carlie Hoffman’s debut collection is excruciating and glorious and true.”
—Binnie Kirshenbaum

“When you die you go to This Alaska. When you’re raised from the dead you’re raised by the memory of song and you will go searching for This Alaska. It is a book of heaven that has not forgotten the body nor the shadow cast by the body, nor how hunger leads you to the slaughterhouse and is love.”
—Josh Bell

“As I read this collection of poetry, I am at once struck by how Carlie seems to know exactly my current situation, how the poems are also pushing against what Michigan and politics insist on right now, a dilution of compassion such that even using the word rings hollow, even light getting lost so that incessant winter becomes the singular season—and even grace disgusts. Carlie offers the true ending of a year, so even that we have gotten incorrect. I return to the poems, seeking what has led us astray, carnival danger leaps out, everything for sale, constant urging to try your luck, for even the dead come into houses, not funeral homes, for I get the feeling that most occupancy is dead to really feeling, dead to possibilities of healing, and this state is delivered in beautiful language of the hope Carlie’s poems offer: soothing cadences of words revealing seldom spoken truths, and that is the actual hope that Carlie identifies, for we must do more than merely hope and dream. For in the end, hopes and dreams are small engines that do not power the cages away.”
—Thylias Moss

From the Publisher