All the Air We Will Ever Breathe by Ruth Cassel Hoffman

Ruth Cassel Hoffman‘s All the Air We Will Ever Breathe pulsates with the vibrant language of one who delights in the music of contraries. She unflinchingly delves into the way life can be measured in loss and yet celebrates the way life mends the breaches. These poems refresh the heart and make us want to experience, as she says, “the hot bright noon at the beginning of desire.”

–Bruce Spang, author of All You’ll Derive: A Caregiver’s Journey

Ruth Cassel Hoffman’s poems can be measured only in emotional light years. One poem’s speaker proclaims, “Einstein / had it wrong,” while another ponders the gentlest questions, “Whether the she-bear / wakens in her dim cave / when her cubs are born.” In “I Would Have Brought Tomatoes,” Hoffman admits, “I’m the daughter / who mislearned every lesson.” Open these pages, and be amazed. Her exquisite vision will change the way you look at the world.

–Shaindel Beers, author of Secure Your Own Mask, winner of the White Pine Poetry Prize

Ruth Cassel Hoffman’s work is “slivered moon, knife-edge, light.” Her poems do not flinch at the discomfiting―the torn flesh of a rabbit, a boy who takes an AR-15 to school, a rat in the pantry. Such strange and marvelous images inhabit these poems: honey on the bone teeth of a china doll in a bee-infested attic, a voice that “looped a thin thread across the sky.” This poet observes the ordinary, ferreting out its mysteries and compressing them into jewels. Anyone who reads this book is indeed fortunate.

–Kathy Nelson, author of Cattails and Whose Names Have Slipped Away, winner of the James Dickey Prize for Poetry