Animal

Alicia Hoffman's ANIMAL is a necessary book. In these fraught times, where connection and disconnection often occur simultaneously, where loneliness and grief coincide with tenderness and determination, Hoffman lays bare the idiosyncrasies of her own lived experience. She writes "if I look long enough through the glass / of my own longing, I find our lives / converging," an invitation to the reader to journey through a lyrical glossary Hoffman reaches for "as if reaching for light." These poems are an accretion of refraction and reflection, a meditation on the animal body both observing and observed; ultimately, the scope of our perspective shifts towards a larger body where even "voices in their anguish" keep us singing.