Cynthia Marie Hoffman, Exploding Head

It Starts

It starts when you are alone in your room, looking up at the window with pink curtains. You count the edges of the window. Right left top bottom. Vaguely you understand not to look at the corners where the edges touch. Beyond the window, minnows swarm the creek, each a slim number 1, tallying each other as they pass. Tick, tick, tick, tick in the dark beneath the eroded tree. The curtains are covered with constellations of glow-in-the-dark stars because you are not allowed to stick them on the ceiling. The curtains hide the corners of the window, but you know they are there, just as you know the minnows are there in the cool water. Everything is all right. The pattern of your counting makes a 4. When the light goes out, the stars illuminate two paths converging toward the heavens.

I was fascinated to see the carved prose blocks of Madison, Wisconsin poet Cynthia Marie Hoffman’s fourth full-length poetry title (and the first of hers I’ve seen), Exploding Head (New York NY: Persea Books, 2024), following Sightseer (2011), Paper Doll Fetus (2014), and Call Me When You Want to Talk about the Tombstones (2018), all also published through Persea Books. A self-described “OCD memoir in prose poems,” the poems of Exploding Head are clean, clear and deliberate, and clustered into four numbered sections. “After some time,” she writes, to open the poem “Beasts,” “you realized you had to get the beasts out of the house, so you dragged them by the horns to the farthest corner of the backyard. Look how they cower at the fence when the sprinkler spits at them in the summer.” Constructed as a quartet-suite of self-contained and compressed prose blocks—one stanza per poem, one poem per page—Hoffman’s lines are straight but the narrative is built to bend, counterpointing the perspectives of the child against that of the mother. In certain ways, the what of her approach is less interesting than the effects, offering a straightforwardness that bleeds almost into a disorientation, before landing utterly elsewhere. “If you stare into the dark hard enough,” she offers, to open the poem “Of Feather,” “something glitters.” There’s almost something of an echo through these of the prose poems of Benjamin Niespodziany, or the short stories of J. Robert Lennon, offering the best of a series of sentences that, for the life of you (and delightfully so), you could never imagine where each poem might end up. “One day you will find a body in a grassy ditch near the road,” the poem “Stipulations” begins, “just as you imagined. The trash bag flaps in the wind. But the body won’t belong to anyone, and no one is dead. Thes are your stipulations.” Either way, I think you should be reading the poems of Cynthia Marie Hoffman.