25 FIRES

Hoffman’s fervent collection of prose poems turns planetary grief and civic fatigue into a plainspoken argument for hope.

These clipped, sermonlike pieces move from climate dread to metaphysical vertigo, then toward a chastened ethic of participation. The opening pages imagine Earth as both a damaged mother and fugitive dwelling (“Momma burns”), yet the planet still offers oceans, woods, boulders, puddles, birds, and the small rituals by which humans remember they belong to a world they keep injuring. Later sections widen the aperture: The Big Bang becomes less a lesson in physics than a myth of inheritance, a reminder that “the carbon in your bones” and “the iron in your blood” bind the body to catastrophe, radiance, and ancient stellar debris. The book is strongest when it lets scale estrange the ordinary: hot coffee, cool pillows, boots, songs, and comfort food appear beside 14 billion years of matter. That interweaving of the household and the cosmic gives the work its humble power. The sharpest lines arrive when the diction hardens into something stranger: “A clump of matter that grew conscious”; “for once it was the world that flinched”; “Our spaceship in the void.” Elsewhere, the poems lean on inherited exhortations—“make a difference,” “change the world,” “do what matters”—and some moral arrivals feel announced, rather than discovered. Still, the collection’s sincerity has ballast, and its short lines, spacious pages, rhetorical questions, and repeated imperatives have the effect of a secular homily, delivered after despair has spent its first violence. This isn’t an oblique or hermetic book; it’s closer to a witnessing, a pep talk, and an ecological lament braided together. Readers who prefer irony may find its earnestness overlit, but the work understands its own wager: that hope, however unfashionable, remains a discipline of attention.

An earnest summons that finds a sense of purpose inside ecological and existential dread.