HOOD of
BONE REVIEW
"In the field I can't help but return to": A Review of Kelly Hoffer's Fire Series
Reviewed by Allie Hoback
I can't say for sure, but I suspect everyone is haunted. Sometimes the haunting is concrete— the past, a person, a place. Sometimes the haunting is more abstract. Language, dreams, the rippling movement of water, or curtains or fire. Kelly Hoffer's Fire Series is deliciously haunted by repetition and return: the eerie way you find yourself back where you've been before. For Hoffer, the return always has some kind of version of change or transformation. The before, the match dropping, the active blaze, the crackle of smolder.
What can repetition and return offer us? Hoffer explores this in several series-sets of poems dispersed throughout the collection, which offers the book a looping structure. One of those sets is the Genesis series, four erasures of Genesis 3:24, which describes the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. Rather than erasure, the term that feels more apt is relief: the mode of sculpture in which forms are drawn out from a surrounding surface. All of the original text of Genesis 3:24 remains visible in the poems, though muted and greyed out, while Hoffer's relief is in regular black text. What's relieved is changed every time, a different central preoccupation of Hoffer's creation from the existing story. This return offers a new way of seeing the fall each time.
From Hoffer's own description of the project: "Fire Series" began as an experiment in working recursively through the specialized diction of fire investigators, using technical phrases such as 'structured fire,' 'foliage freeze,' and 'fire interval' to generate poems." Investigate she does: there's often a clear associative logic from one poem to another in their sequencing. the collection is primarily concerned with making sense of the self. There's a meditative quality to this sensemaking, but also one of exploring logical arguments. In "An exercise in which I try to see the blue in the red flame" she writes:
"The thing I desire, the cause of my suffering.
my desire, too, causes me suffering.
if I must countenance it, why not be its object." (94)
The central concern of bargaining with the different internal parts of oneself lands exceptionally well. If I have to live with my desire, why not be desire's agent? Hoffer looks closely at the paths available to her, particularly in poems with titles like "Do I take to the heather" and " Do I set the heather on fire", but also in "Pluming":
Which parts of the self are you saving, which are you abandoning? These poems also seem to ask how the saving is done, whether it's an attempt to stop the burning or if it's to continue to love what has been burned and changed. Hoffer is interested in the boundaries and definitions within the self. She writes: "am I, was I a predator. // am I prey." ("God is a Kite," 6). How often are we in multiple roles purely based on perspective? Hoffer is acutely aware of this: "I am constant in my remaking, making" ("Pluming," 16). Identity is never quite as fixed as we may think it is or want it to be.
There is a preoccupation with change across the poems, particularly the changes after death or the evolution of a relationship. Again, in "Pluming," the poet wonders if writing about her mother's death will alter her mother, if new creation erases the actual. In "Field holiday," the wonder is around how much oneself changes in a partnership:
She gets at a direct articulation in "Fire Break"— "how do you protect a body from language" (90). If everything is in constant flux, the creator and artist might as well be, or even should be, too.
Reaching the final poems in this collection, there's a luminous togetherness of a self split, a self of a before and an after, like a forest before and after a fire; irreversibly changed. There is a beautiful and radical honesty in the final couplet of the penultimate poem, "I invest in horizon futures": "I lied when I said to / my desire, I didn't know you." (117) The poet turns towards the unbearable and painful parts of herself and accepts it.
It is satisfying to watch the work of searching and inquiry in these poems, with just enough air and abstraction in them to do what a good poem should do: prompt the reader to turn the interrogation lamp on themselves after reading. And even more satisfying, even more liberating, to find the freedom from want in the end. The last words of the collection: "where I seek nothing / and sleep." (119)
In the Racket series of poems, Hoffer writes: "Is this the good fruit, she asks, / Is this the good labor?" ("Racket ii," 101) Her work of self-discovery and self-invention through verse in the white hot heat of the flame is assuredly that good fruit, that good labor.
Fire Series. By Kelly Hoffer. Pittsburg: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2026. 136pp. $20.00.
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"Which animal
Is it becoming, which mammal are you
abandoning I follow the fiery dot the horizon pens me in
Night comes to me
extending its feathers" (13)
"I'm sorry are you unfamiliar
with the animal version of my
jaw..." (67)