Call Me When You Want to Talk about the Tombstones
A mother inherits a leather box containing scraps of family papers and photos dating back more than a century. Her daughter joins her on a moving quest to reconstruct their family history. Together they sift through archives and inspect eroded headstones, piecing together their ancestry in order to understand who they are. Elegiac yet spirited, Call Me When You Want to Talk about the Tombstones is a scavenger hunt, a DNA test, a jigsaw puzzle of lineage. Cynthia Marie Hoffman is “a rising star”, a poet of infectious and meticulous vision.
Cynthia Marie Hoffman
Cynthia Marie Hoffman is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, Paper Doll Fetus, Sightseer, and the forthcoming Call Me When You Want to Talk About the Tombstones, as well as the chapbook Her Human Costume. Hoffman is the recipient of a Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, a Director’s Guest fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Wisconsin Arts Board. Her poems have appeared in Jubilat, Pleiades, Fence, Blackbird, diode, The Journal, and elsewhere.