Hold the Contraries

"Where will the accumulations of the daily joys go?" asks the still and tender voice in Angela Hoffman's Hold the Contraries. The answer, this collection suggests, depends-not on our ability to control or limit suffering, but on our full surrender to a "broken-open" attention-a frailty that startles each person "back into the world." The quiet courage found here invites us to "live into our answers" by embracing fullness and emptiness, both. A pilgrimage rooted in well-earned wisdom and beauty.

-Lauren K. Carlson, inaugural Lorine Niedecker Fellow and author of Animals I Have Killed



In Hold the Contraries, Angela Hoffman explores the paradoxes that life presents. Here are poems of emotional complexity, rapturous imagery, and surprising juxtapositions: "I cut the last of the pink hydrangeas. I cut off intimacy." They acknowledge pain, doubt, "driving in fog, snow, rain, ice," reveal "evening primrose, night phlox / all dancing in their nightgowns." Amid suffering, Hoffman struggles to find peace: "sit in the stillness, / feel earth's tender breath, just like the moth." Both spiritual and deeply human, these poems were "composted in my garden, / turned over and over into wisdom." I savored them; so will you.

-Peggy Turnbull, author of The Joy of Their Holiness



This is a most enjoyable collection of poems. The works engage the senses and massage all emotions. Angela's skill in a poem's universality shines in "When Clouds Break Open" and "Rain" Her keen observation skills give the reader focus on a wide range of science facts and human interactions. Her personal poems take the reader on the journey of Angela's adult life and finding her voice.

-Nancy Rafal, Door County Poet Laureate 2019-2021