One More World Like This World

Following When There Was Light (Winner of the 2023 National Jewish Book Award in Poetry), Carlie Hoffman's third collection of poetry, One More World like This World, is a lyrical study of contemporary life--its lines echo amidst the imbalanced interdependence of globalization, in the wake of third-wave feminism, and from the active collapse of our American empire. Hoffman's poems brilliantly survey both how women have been flattened, misunderstood, and displaced throughout time and across disciplines, and how women have made themselves at home in their minds and within their specific histories.

Approaching adaptation as a coping mechanism against perpetual exile, Hoffman recasts female archetypes as contemporary women, drawing a throughline between the narrative past and present circumstances. Persephone follows her captor "deeper inside the replica of girlhood," and Eurydice in New Jersey "knew where she was going" as she made her way to death across "the parking lot and graveyard's / fertile grass." Rather than simply retelling a familiar tale, Hoffman's poems illuminate mythology as a discourse with time and recognize solidarity between women as a conversation that continues beyond the grave.

The timeless wisdom of this collection is how it unveils the constant and concurrent tragedies taking place everywhere around us while salvaging the irreducible pleasure of living from the wrecks of perception. Despite it all, we want to live. Perhaps, Hoffman seems to say, we were expelled from the garden not once but again and again, and, each time we exit, we go out searching for one more world like this world. "The apple's a for-sale sign swaying from the tree," she writes in the collection's final poem "Borges Sells Me the Apple, Sells Me the World." Or, to revisit the stage set in "Teaching the Persona Poem at Ramapo College of New Jersey," "Outside the classroom window, snow falls, unencumbered / by a wind from nowhere the night Eurydice chooses to stay."


Author: Carlie Hoffman
Publisher: Four Way Books
Published: 03/15/2025
Pages: 80
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.31lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.60d
ISBN: 9781961897281

About the Author
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 & 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 Bl?tenlese (World Poetry Books, 2026) and White Shadows: Anneliese Hager and the Camera-less Photograph (Atelier ?ditions, 2025), as well as the poems of Rose Ausl?nder. Hoffman's other honors include a 92NY "Discovery" / Boston Review prize and a Poets & Writers Amy Award. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Small Orange Journal.