Ava Hofmann

[...] Ava Hofmann

At once a modern grimoire, a transition record, and a meditation on the encounter with the archive, [...] employs visual techniques to reexamine that which is missing. Reimagining Old English charms in a willfully anachronistic, willful context, [...] places the past and present into a conflicted conversation which finds synthesis in poems that combine delicately crafted verse forms and wildly experimental visual poetry. [...] asks you to read what has not been written, and to rescue the things that have been lost.




[...] is a manual, diary, song cycle, catechism, puzzle, concrete and pattern poem, encyclopedia, Dickinsonian letter. It is a book of charms too, like the Old English metrical charms, but as we encounter them now-discontinuous, their lived-life long past. Hofmann's poems sing the lost object in its lostness: the encountering of something handed down, irretrievable, and shot through with mourning. The "meanings are in some sense interchangeable" because they are wards, "attempts to resolve illnesses through semiotic means." Or, put another way, the violences these charms protect against are the semiotic violences that necessitated them; they gesture, piecemeal, from out the historiography of violences they name and leave behind. Continuity is foregone; we are left with the drama of discontinuity, that comes before, determines: "a slit thru / lyric's stolen dirt." It's a slit Hofmann whispers through, a half-shell. Should you listen, it resonates. So put it to your ear. Behold the headphones of the world.

- Jos Charles, author of Safe Space and Feeld