Middens of the tribe

Part family romance, part deconstructed novel, Middens of the Tribe repossesses for poetry a range of experience long ceded to fiction. With his well-tuned ear for the rhythms of speech and his resourceful versing, Daniel Hoffman explores the consonances and contrasts between interconnected lives in a modern city and an archaeologist's reconstruction of a primitive people's past: Can the middens / of the tribe I study tell if family / strife always reveals a culture's dynamics, / if, amid bones, flints, sufferings are the same? Leavened by touches comic and grotesque, Middens of the Tribe reveals, in the nexus of lives intertwined, a cubist rendering of intimacy, alienation, and loss.