Her Human Costume
A chapbook-length series of prose poems
Winner of the 2013 Gold Line Press Poetry Chapbook Competition
Cynthia Marie Hoffman’s poetry chapbook explores memory, family history, loss, and selfhood through a hypnotic and airtight series of prose poems whose focus and singularity bloom from every page. Hoffman’s finely honed powers of observation and personal prophecy propel this collection to a stunning conclusion that readers will not soon forget.
Her Human Costume, composed of twenty-six interlaced prose poems, unfolds, refolds, transforms like deft colorful origami. Quietly and intently passionate, with images that surprise and disturb, dense quick cuts make these poems sizzle. The whole builds, a learning of the alphabet, the birth of a child, the trauma of a family—domestic scenes displaced to an ethereal other world, one where “real” sheds its costume to show its other costumes, the contingent forms of our earthly habitations brought into taunting, flickering illumination.
Susan McCabe
The intimacy of the female subjects is so tightly woven that one scarcely notices the absence of conscious masculine influence. The world depicted by Hoffman of a quiet life lived by related women is a universe of its own complete with tenderness, confusion, longing, joy, wistfulness, nostalgia, and grief.
Eleven Eleven