Books
Dear Wallace
Winner of the backwaters prize in poetry • 2024 • The Backwaters Press, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press Part homage, part rebuke, part domestic cri de coeur, Dear Wallace levels a nervy, philosophical critique at the myth of male genius and the American dream. Supreme fictions be damned. Here are notes towards a subversive, feminist reality.
—Suzanne Buffam, author of A Pillow Book
In her daring, necessary Dear Wallace, poet Julie Choffel insists, “what people don’t realize is/ form is personal.” These urgent poems enact the realization that the personal is never settled, but needs to be discovered anew, line by line. For Choffel, poetry is not the cry but rather the hope laden in the occasion of our humanity. Her work is an act of what listening sounds like.
—Richard Deming, author of This Exquisite Loneliness
With one part whimsy, one part despair, and a snogger of wry wit, Choffel drops us into the most halcyon disturbance ever to wake the dead. Here are the residues of our times: grief, parental exhaustion, a proclivity to avoid pants, proffered with restraint and tonal finesse to match her interlocutor, Wallace Stevens. From a domestic abyss that is gritty and abiding, these poems call to us, and with the grace of a grave digger’s ladder, deliver us altered, onto the turned earth, blinking.
the hello delay
Winner of the poets out loud prize • 2012 • Fordham University Press Julie Choffel’s poems emerge with fine detail and sonic brilliance to query the boundaries of meaning. She writes: “an outcrop, a cropping, crow/ and we're clapping// and maybe we're making what we desire.” Such lyric pressures attempt a sort of magical interface to force back an intrusive and alienating world. Her lines are organized by a willful and energetic intelligence.
Julie Choffel's debut book of poems, The Hello Delay, welcomes us into a world where there is no repetition, instead endless iterations of the same connections, falling deep into the imaginative hole of existence. It is very quickly in the book that we realize that this is our world, too. Choffel softens this news, by letting us know from the get-go that this “poetry is not a camera.” And no, this is not a poetry that simply captures the everyday like a camera, but instead generously gives us neverendingly gorgeous, breathtakingly beautiful manifestations of it. So, that we might approach life with sweetness and begin to appreciate the continuous mystery. And in doing so, we know that Choffel is a master poet, one who will guide us through this life and beyond it.
This book works with one of those serious beautiful struggles – how to be someone to something, in a world where “I” and “thou” are so often nothing to no one, where “pronouns are disasters.” We readers of poetry are “uncertain animals,” and, lucky for us, Julie Choffel’s poems get caught up in the filmy place between our uncertainty and our animality. Her work has both the delicacy and the ungainly chaos of forms emerging from raw materials curiously moving toward thinghood, following their vowels toward meaning: “the topical, psychotropic battle.” The Hello Delay is teeming with animist music, animal motion, and human circumspection. Teeming.
ReviewschapBooks
The Inevitable Return of What We Do Not Love
2022 • Finishing Line PressLike the best songs, Julie Choffel’s The Inevitable Return of What We Do Not Love is a poem fueled by desire. To have “so many / ways to say I want” is dangerous and selfish, we’ve heard: we should be content; we should be grateful. But “women are never / not hungry,” Choffel’s mother-speaker insists, aware that her life plays out as two tracks in the same song—the material world of meals and routines as well as the imaginative realm. The poem becomes a vehicle for satisfying its own longings, a gift then passed along to us as readers—so that we, too, might dance to such a soundtrack in our kitchens and in the otherworlds that envelop the everyday.
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The Chicories
2019 • Ethel Press
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Figures in a Surplus
2010 • Achiote Press (out of print)