You tell the story of my childhood and early adulthood even though you are talking Georgia and I was in Wisconsin. You are brave and so generous in sharing the story and its intimacies of your life experience.

~Ruth Ackerman, Santa Barbara, CA

 Library of Congress Collection, Photographer: Esther Bubley

Eve 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. Her voice provides a rare window into complicated issues of identity, community, social evil and moral possibilities. 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.  

~Robert M Franklin, PhD, President Emeritus, Morehouse College

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. How is the question?

~Anne Palms Chalmers, Newton, MA

The poems in Eve Hoffman’s Memory & Complicity are rich with the details that comprise one woman’s extraordinary life. 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.

~Marjory Wentworth, South Carolina Poet Laureate

Eve Hoffman is a born storyteller and sixth generation Southerner with deep roots in north Georgia’s red clay. 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. Here are stories of becoming, inseparable from those rays of self-awareness that mark the stages of personal life interwoven with historical currents. And here is a vision of a South still aborning, like herself. Her poetry brings us home to where the heart lives. 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.  

     ~ Jamil Zainaldin, President, Georgia Humanities Council