A History of Place by Mala Hoffman

Given the title of Mala Hoffman’s collection (I love the promise and surprise in titles), one might expect a sense of place extravaganza, or a series of poems exploring the history of a particular spot. Instead, this book is a contemporary woman’s minimalist Hero with a Thousand Faces adventure toward psychological wholeness: the places, intersects, and pasts that must be confronted in order to get there. Despite place names for each title, we never know exactly where we are in these poems, only the specificity of moment, and so each poem is experienced like a dream. It is a series of compelled placements, or, more accurately, displacements, in a haunting from cultural history, anti-Semitism, and family. Dreams: the sharp disturbing image, the inner message in the conflict with the setting, and then it’s over, and we think, what was that? When set in art, and so no longer mediated by time, we can explore, re-enter, sift through “what that was” in our own histories/dreams. Hoffman’s erudition and linguistic craft in these spare poems fully grasp, and in the end, they cut straight to the light switch. I will read them again.

–Dennis Doherty is author of four volumes of poetry: The Bad Man (Ye Olde Font Shoppe Press, 2004), Fugitive (Codhill Press, 2007), Crush Test (Codhill Press, 2010), and Black Irish (Codhill Press, 2016). He teaches literature and creative writing at SUNY New Paltz.