One More World Like This World by Carlie Hoffman Review by Shannon Vare Christine

One More World Like This World by Carlie Hoffman

Review by Shannon Vare Christine

Publisher: Four Way Books

Publication Date: March 2025

ISBN: 978-1-961897-28-1

Pages: 80

In One More World Like This World, Carlie Hoffman posits that all people are living in halves, whether it’s a duality of roles, stages, or times. It’s impossible to avoid this coupling of ourselves, as many exist as both parent and child, student and teacher, woman and man, present and past self, all irrevocably leading up to the moment when a person straddles their existence between life and death. The liminal spaces within these states of being leaves much to examine, analyze, and dissect. After all, “language / is a person-sized regret — no day is safe from news of me.” There aren’t sufficient words and descriptors to capture the depth of this speaker’s sorrow and pathos, however, Hoffman sets out to pin down the layered histories and injustices that form the divisions inhabiting the modern woman. Like the mythical Eurydice, the speaker “didn’t / leave the light / but swallowed it, / demanding a better song.”

The beginning of this volume starts with the idea of home and the speaker’s longing for this conceptual central space: “the clock ticks near the window, sound / leaking like bed oil and watch how the curtain sops / the smell of the past.” In this residence she envisions to be her own, she is carving out a life for herself, however she is also mindful of the passing of time and the trappings of the past. There are a multitude of perfectly crafted vignettes similar to this one, existing on these pages like carefully curated exhibitions in an art museum. The reader can observe these staged scenes and characters, yet each person needs to derive their own meanings and interpretations from them. Each reader needs to discover their place in the collective female ancestry presented here. The speaker herself shifts in her placement of herself in this hierarchy. As she moves from poem to poem, she contemplates the present and the past: “my voice / an empty basin, stone / taking on the mouth’s shape. / If I heard music / it was a sound from below, vibration / thickening from under the earth.” These allusions to the ways in which women have been historically silenced spring to life, and they can just as easily become references to hell, depression, anxiety, or self-doubt. Perhaps it’s the speaker’s interior trapped Eurydice beckoning to be released.

Three distinct sections comprise this book and ground each set of poems in Section I: The Garden, Section II: The Replica, or Section III: Then Roses. These call to mind the biblical Creation story, as well as the stages of a female along her journey of self-discovery. The first section has place names appearing in titles and settings, but “sadness / flew toward me from a bag of leaves, / invisible sound so beautiful” “where the dead go, they leave music behind.” The speaker recognizes the power of grief, as well as celebrates the urge to commemorate the aftershocks of the deceased within the speaker’s life. Intertwined with this grief is an observation and examination of the changes that arrive in a woman’s perimenopausal years as “the woman’s moon / descends the smoke stacks / where she finally swims / the sea again.” Instead of trying to escape these experiences, the speaker sinks into them and allows them to fully surround her “as in a song I know but have newly / forgotten as in my tongue / weakens its knowing.” And eventually, forgetting grief, if even for a moment, becomes possible for “it is not language / clearing the landscape / of what I’ve known.”

As one would expect with the second section titled, “The Replica,” the speaker is trying on personas linking herself to mythological and literary women, and perhaps questioning whether she is yet another iteration of these heralded women. Are all humans replicas or duplicates of historical archetypes, doomed, fated, or reassured by this repetitive path? Are humans learning from their errors, or are they simply continuing to exist in a world that “can be the saddest fish tank”? 

There is a poem in this sequence that is a variation on an earlier one, and both poems are titled “Author’s Myth.” These underscore the nature of humans in their ability to edit their lives and revise previous understandings they may have clung to in their past. The second “Author’s Myth” ends with a line that is somewhat shared with the beginning line of the first poem. Instead of the assertion “Despite loving the strawberries for how they are wildly beautiful” the line changes to “The strawberries are beautifully wild and you love—.” Additionally, the second poem begins with “Not every animal can begin at the beginning where an ocean can’t / be read. Out of nature / a voice glows like a tree survived out of all / the unnamed animals.” The original line, which served as the ending, was “there is a tree you cannot name. Its voice glows out of nature, you must / attempt, (because it can’t / be read), / where / an ocean begins at the beginning and not every animal can.” While the first rendition is sprawling, puzzling, and uncertain, the second one is concise, coherent, and declarative. The speaker is gaining confidence and knowledge, even if only garnered through retrospection, and she considers the connected and contrary forces existing between humans and nature. Both poems can be read singly, together, or even in reverse with new insights revealed dependent on the order with which they are read.

Structurally, the final section, “Then Roses”, continues to make use of repetitive opening phrases and amended poems. The use of “after the,” “out of the,” “how the,” “you,” and “If the,” allow the reader to share in the speaker’s revisiting of doubts, as she tries to organize the portions of herself and the world. “Refurbished Eden” becomes “Eden in Foreclosure” and earlier allusions to Eurydice transform into “New World: Eurydice.” Many of these poems contain borrowed lines, draw on translations, or even reimagine versions of other poems or poets’ reflections. Again the emergence of halves, containing similar yet contrasting ideas, is ever present: “The dream came back, and I split in two.” There are also recurring images relating back to trees and plants, with their buried, invisible hemispheres, as well as what is revealed in their above ground growth. There are the visible and subconscious selves always at play, waiting to be revisited and amended. This universal assemblage of one’s self mirrors the speaker recasting her own mythology. If one listens carefully, they too can tap into a third space between these past and present lives. This area emerges and it is within these liminal expanses and margins where the future self can slowly materialize and become revealed. 

Shannon Vare Christine is a poet, teacher, and critic living in Bucks County, PA. She is an alumnus of The Community of Writers and Tupelo Press 30/30 Project. Her poems are featured in various anthologies and publications, and her manuscript, Chrysanthemum, was a finalist for publication by The Word Works. Additionally, her poetry reviews and literary criticism were published or are forthcoming in Lily Poetry Review, The Lit Pub, Cider Press Review, Sage Cigarettes, Compulsive Reader, The Laurel Review, Vagabond City, Tupelo Quarterly, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Harbor Review, and Uirtus. Archived writing and more can be found at  www.shannonvarechristine.com, her periodic newsletter, Poetic Pause, and on Instagram @smvarewrites.

Carlie Hoffman is the author of the poetry collections One More World Like This World (Four Way Books, 2025); When There Was Light (Four Way Books, 2023), winner of the National Jewish Book Award; and This Alaska (Four Way Books, 2021), winner of the Northern California Publishers and Authors Gold Award in Poetry as well as a finalist for the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award. Hoffman is the translator from the German of both Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger’s Blütenlese [Harvest of Blossoms], forthcoming from World Poetry Books, and White Shadows: Anneliese Hager and the Camera-less Photograph (Atelier Éditions, 2023). Hoffman’s other honors include a 92NY Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize and a Poets & Writers Amy Award. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Small Orange Journal. 

19 November 2025