“UNDERSHORE is incandescent, like an electric light housing a filament which glows when a current passes through it. A filament as tender and tenacious as spider silk weathering the elements. Its lyrical adroitness is immediately felt and heard… After a death comes a ‘disrupted texture,’ but in mapping the body with the natural world, the speaker finds a way to move forward, as clouds are never not moving, as plants continue to grow toward the sun, until the day that they don't. Never will I forget this speaker: ‘try to shape my mouth a poppy /ringed with dew, my neck a greening nape. I come / off inelegant—something borrowed, something / burrowed. unseemly. lustering.’ Yet in these vulnerable admissions of self, and statements of sheer longing, the poet's sightline is unerringly honest, seeking, and true.”

“The edges in Kelly Hoffer’s vibrant poems are sharpened with delight: ‘the neon crocus / knocks your skirt up’! This stunning debut collection brims with the physicality of desire and loss as it tracks the complex imprints and entanglements of embodied experience. Attending to both the disorientation and anchoring of conscious life, these poems reverberate with emergent realities: the felt properties of the bloom, the apparition, the lush shores and ledges of evolutionary knowledge, even the shifting cusps of denotative meaning that rise and fall through the pages of the dictionary. The afterlife of each felt space opens up a vivid inner elsewhere that locates us right here, in the fiery light of ‘the un- /dead side of the river.’” 

“Kelly Hoffer’s arresting and lyric collection UNDERSHORE explores how to write about loss and living with ‘linelush’ precision. Among these poems mapping the grieving process of a daughter’s loss of her mother is a poignancy of how she writes about suffering clearly and philosophically. The poems declare what they want, their desires mark the scenery and the interiority behind or under ground, sky, and water, grasping dearly how ‘a hovering void,’ becomes a site at which the speaker’s comprehension connects to a ‘truer deep.’ This collection is full of capacious wisdom, needed turnings of insight so hard to find elsewhere. I hold this book tight.”