Call Me When You Want to Talk About the Tombstones
A mother-daughter genealogical treasure hunt.
A mother inherits a leather box containing scraps of family papers and photos dating back more than a century. Her daughter joins her on a moving quest to reconstruct their family history. Together they sift through archives and inspect eroded headstones, piecing together their ancestry in order to understand who they are. Elegiac yet spirited, Call Me When You Want to Talk about the Tombstones is a scavenger hunt, a DNA test, a jigsaw puzzle of lineage. Cynthia Marie Hoffman is “a rising star” (Library Journal), a poet of infectious and meticulous vision.
“The heartache of combing through photographs, century-old script, and a cemetery’s confusion lies not in the sorrow of each ghost’s story, but in how intimately one’s own death then asks to be companioned and carried. Cynthia Marie Hoffman obsessively and nimbly combs, witnessing histories both harrowing and common, and it is her practice of hand and mind that moves us, as readers, to view each living face before us as subject to the one last fact: death—and us, in turn, as future mourners. This virtuosic, lyrical meditation can therefore orient us ethically, deeply, and beautifully to each other and to our mortal selves.”
Katie Ford
“Call Me When You Want to Talk About the Tombstones is a haunting, thrilling experience. Each line of Hoffman’s tactile, incandescent poetry recovers, for a moment, the irrecoverable past with stunning clarity.”
Nick Lantz
