Saturated in myth, from the biblical Garden of Eden to Eurydice, Carlie Hoffman’s new collection contemplates a world like the one we live in, only more deliberate. One More World Like This World proceeds in three parts from the Garden to the Replica and Then Roses, that thorny symbol of completion, or perfection. The collection is prefaced by “After Translating the Women of the 20th Century,” in which she imagines a “lipsticked girl chewing a match” – an image borrowed from Seamus Heaney – inhabiting the “house” (that is, the world) where “the curtain sops / the smell of the past.” Women are gliding from god’s photographs in the first and final stanzas of the poem, and the lipsticked girl? In the last line, “She is playing music when god is renounced.”
Interestingly, the Garden opens on a cemetery in New Jersey, and who should come through “the parking lot and graveyard’s / fertile grass” but Eurydice, and she knows where she is going, “her white gown / blown downward, her music / bleeding from the inside, out.”
She didn’t
leave the light
but swallowed it
demanding a better song.
And so the journey of transformation begins.
Eurydice appears in “A Condo For Sale Overlooking the Cemetery in Kearny, NJ,” “The Townspeople Contemplate Eurydice,” in which she is brushing her teeth “in her boring / underwear”, “Teaching the Persona Poem at Ramapo College of New Jersey,” “Eden in Foreclosure” (“Farm Fresh Apples swings the wooden sign above / a crowded barrel where Eurydice stands...”) and “New World: Eurydice,” which begins, “I wanted to return to the garden, but it is too late.”
“Teaching the Persona Poem at Ramapo College of New Jersey,” begins, “In another poem with a doll, this one by Ai...” This clues the reader to its relation to the previous poem, “Driving Through Maspeth, NY, After Teaching an Introduction to Creative Writing Class.” Yes, they’re both about teaching poetry, but crucially they both have to do with girlhood and innocence. What’s more innocent than a doll? In the first her class had been considering Anne Sexton’s “Cigarettes and Whiskey and Wild, Wild Women,” in which Sexton recalls certain unpleasant memories from childhood (the stockade, “the “fume of the enema” – “steam from the factory / of girlhood,” indeed). Here, Hoffman tells us “The doll / in the poem is desire / and terror.”
Then, in the next poem, the one about Ai’s “The Kid,” in which a fourteen-year-old boy murders his family before making off with his mother’s satin nightgown and his sister’s mud-smeared doll, Hoffman writes: “I don’t know
if here I am the woman returned to the scene of disaster, transfigured,
the apple inside me rising from the edges of my body as speech.
Outside the classroom window, snow falls, unencumbered
by a wind from nowhere the night Eurydice chooses to stay.
She asks her students to describe “the feeling of rage before it rises from the body.” That “desire and terror”?
Moreover, in “Inventory,” the poem that comes right before “Driving Through Maspeth...,” Hoffman recalls another job she had in a mall at a store called “Build-a-Bear.” Taking stock of the array of items in the stockroom at the back of the store, she notes a used condom, pubic hairs stuck to the glass of snowglobes:
seeds in a pomegranate.
Within his glassy dome, snow is falling
as Hades takes Persephone
deeper inside the replica of girlhood.
The story of Hades and Persephone, of course, is the story of a rape. Note the word “replica,” the title of the middle section where these poems are found. Persephone and Eurydice both embody themes of love and loss and the underworld. Persephone plays a role in the Eurydice myth, too. She and her rapist husband Hades set the conditions for Eurydice’s release back to the world after the nymph’s tragic death.
If Eurydice shows up, you can count on Orpheus not being far behind. “Point of View Where Orpheus Makes a Pit Stop at a Fortune Teller in St. Germain” is the first poem in the final section. The fortune teller tells Orpheus,
Don’t you see
the woman controls your weather now,
each cloud babbling her image,
a faint music, the exit
already closing from below.
In the myth, Orpheus is instructed not to look back, if he wants Eurydice to get out of the underworld, and of course he does.
Moses is another mythological/historical figure who appears throughout One More World Like This World. He’s mentioned in both poems called “Author’s Myth,” “Refurbished Eden” (“He holds his staff / like Moses in the garden,” Hoffman writes of her father), and “Moses of Brooklyn.”
Music and song are important elements in One More World Like This World. The “lipsticked girl” (Eurydice?) is playing music when god is renounced. Eurydice “demands a better song” at the conclusion of “A Condo for Sale....” “Memory of France,” “November Morning on Graham Avenue” and “The Wolves Ran on Through the Evergreen Forests” (“Little monster on my lap, your song is broken, unbearable”) all make reference to song and music. In “Ode to the Sudden Forgetting of Your Grief” Hoffman refers to “a song I knew but have newly / forgotten.” In “Reading Virginia Woolf in a Women in Literature Class at Bergen Community College,” a poem about the heartbreak and confusion of youthful sex (“girlhood”), boys in V-necks and tight jeans “play music in bands, smoke weed in the kitchen.” In “Myth of Icarus as Girl, Leaving” the narrator is in Israel where “we sing / hiking Masada.” It’s more than background noise and not exactly the soundtrack that alerts a moviegoer to danger or sentimentality. Song is part of the drama, almost like a character itself.
There’s a wonderful symmetry in One More World Like This World. The nine poems that make up the Garden section are matched by nine in the Then Roses section (one world like the other), with a dozen in the center section, Replica. Poems titled “Borges Sells Me the Apple, Sells Me the World” appear in both the first and third sections; the final poem in the collection, indeed, bears that title. The apple, of course is a synecdoche for Eden.
Apples show up all over the place, too, not just in the Borges poems. We’ve already seen them in “Teaching the Persona Poem at Ramapo College of New Jersey” and “Eden in Foreclosure.” In “At the CarMax in Maryland to Sell Your Used Civic That Doesn’t Have Air Conditioning but Was Your Grandmother’s and the Only Place You’ve Ever Owned,” the car is “Bad like an apple,” and “You hold the pen like an apple” (temptation?), signing the documents.
So what is god’s renunciation all about, as alluded to in the opening poem? Is it a denunciation of the patriarchy? The subjugation of women throughout history? (The poem, “Mary Magdalene, Mary Oliver, & Me” was written in response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022.) One More World Like This World is a thought-provoking collection, beautifully bound by its imagery and mythical references. But please don’t ask me to summarize its “meaning” in a sentence! This collection is much more nuanced and suggestive than that.
“One More World Like This World”
Poetry
Four Way Books, 2025
$17.95, 80 pages
ISBN: 978-1-961887-29-8