I could sum up this chapbook by Canadian writer C. E. Hoffman with these pinnacle lines: “That glimpse of sweat down my arm from my breast/like the sliver of spit on the other/from fingerfucking my face for 10 cents on the internet./THIS BODY IS MINE, it is soul and breath/no matter what eyes lie upon it,” and call it good, count on the beautiful, dirty lyricism to carry readers to this work, but the conventions of the review genre and the realities of publishing preclude me from such brevity and necessitate a longer write-up. Fuck me, I guess.

My correspondence with Hoffman began in the slush pile, where I pulled a couple poems for FILTH and within moments felt that click, that inexplicable gut response that tells me when something is good enough to run on the site, before I’d even made my way to the end of the submission. I would call myself a fan if I’d read more of their work, so when I got the opportunity to do just that I jumped at it, and I’m glad I did, because Blood, Booze, and Other Things in Nature is the kind of thing that inspires fandom.

It’s brutally unpretentious, for starters. There are conventional poetic forms to be played with here, certainly, and Hoffman clearly knows how to write a poem, but this is also poetry that’s meant to reach the reader where they’re at, rich enough for the highfalutin types but immediate enough for the lay consumer (I confess myself more the latter.), laid out in accessible lines one after the other which slip through the mind and leave a gliding impression before ushering the reader on to the next gift to be offered. It makes for a pleasurable reading experience, the thing I prioritize more than any other. 

The chapbook is also vulgar as fuck, but does not cross that ever-important line into unintentional parody territory. There is tasteful sex work and drug use and domestic violence juxtaposed with a clear love of nature and the more gentle aspects of human existence, creating an effect not of contrast but of blending, wherein all things are valid and all things are to be worthy of consideration and adornment, and the full manifestation of this is beauty from filth, roses from shit, and it’s breathtaking to behold.

The sense of unadorned prettiness is hard to explain but so valuable to the text. Hoffman isn’t fucking around: These are bruiser poems, uncompromising without being too in-your-face about it, shock laid aside in favor of delicacy, a tapestry of the grotesque and the sublime in equal measure, woven with threads of reality so fine as to be achingly fragile. This is poetry for people that don’t like poetry just as much as it for the die-hards that trawl the zine sections of indie bookstores, the accessibility a boon in every sense.

So now, I’m a fan, and I can give a fan’s recommendation to this little book, which is really more useful than the checkmark or star from a review. What Hoffman has done here is not just worthy of praise, but more importantly, is something worth reading, absorbing, allowing to live in your mind for a moment, just long enough to leave behind it a glistening trail of loveliness. Tune in and drop out, it’s good shit.

Blood, Booze, and Other Things in Nature by C. E. Hoffman is available May 15 from Alien Buddha Press.