We walk with her though an exhibit of one hundred and fifty postcards of lynchings. In Memory & Complicity, we feel skirts of summer dust as Eve Hoffman rides on dirt roads barefoot on a bike or clings to a runaway horse. ~ Jamil Zainaldin, President, Georgia Humanities Council
In the end, her work stands as a testimonial to a love that lives both in the ordinariness and in the trials, losses, struggles of our lives-if we but look. Her poetry brings us home to where the heart lives. And here is a vision of a South still aborning, like herself. Here are stories of becoming, inseparable from those rays of self-awareness that mark the stages of personal life interwoven with historical currents. Her poetry is a story of time and of family that called her home after sojourns in Massachusetts, Africa and California-but she, and it, had also changed. ~Marjory Wentworth, South Carolina Poet LaureateĮve Hoffman is a born storyteller and sixth generation Southerner with deep roots in north Georgia’s red clay. Starting with her childhood in rural Georgia, Hoffman describes “a girl of eight or ten on a dairy farm bordered/by a winding river with an Indian name I couldn’t spell.” This awareness of her surroundings expands to include the realities of racism (this is the South in the 1950’s and 1960’s) and anti-Semitism (Eve Hoffman is Jewish), while lovingly describing a “barefoot child on summer days/picking blue cornflowers beside the ditch.” The balance between personal anecdotes and the social and political realities impacting the sweep of her life, is maintained throughout with emotional honesty that is sometimes painful, but always beautiful. The poems in Eve Hoffman’s Memory & Complicity are rich with the details that comprise one woman’s extraordinary life. Memory & Complicity leaves me with the feeling that this polarizing destruction of our country can only begin to be healed by recognizing and fostering similarly shared emotional experience. ~Robert M Franklin, PhD, President Emeritus, Morehouse College I hope that you will peer into this unsettling mirror, invited by her lyrical gifts, and begin the process of reflection, dialogue and action to repair a broken world. Her voice provides a rare window into complicated issues of identity, community, social evil and moral possibilities. Library of Congress Collection, Photographer: Esther BubleyĮve Hoffman’s book of memories arrives at a conflicted time in American life and culture, and provides much needed insight into the paths that led us here and possibilities for going forward. You are brave and so generous in sharing the story and its intimacies of your life experience. You tell the story of my childhood and early adulthood even though you are talking Georgia and I was in Wisconsin.
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