2019 March Book Group

About the Author and Her Book

Eve Hoffman began writing poetry at age 60. She is a sixth generation Georgian. Along the way she graduated from Smith College, studied in Africa, worked at Stanford and then settled back to the land she loves to raise a family. Eve has held public office, impacted education and environmental policy, and founded a statewide K-12 writing competition. Her lineage includes a Revolutionary War soldier, a mill owner “hung near to death” by Yankees, a suffragette leader, and a grandfather who helped shape the modern South. Georgia Trend has named Eve as one of its 100 influential people.

Like Eve herself, Memory & Complicity is rooted in Georgia red clay while it ranges through other places and times -- some personal, some historic -- always circling round from childhood on the dairy farm by the river. It evokes memories of a precious past, while it shares complicity in the moral sensibilities that were sometimes missed back then. The Neely farm is no more. Like so much of Georgia in our time, it has transitioned from rural to urban, and its Chattahoochee River acreage has become the City of Peachtree Corners. Yet poetry has preserved a lost time and place for Eve Hoffman and all her readers. Learn more about Eve Hoffman and her work at her website https://evehoffmanpoet.com/

From the Publisher

In Memory & Complicity , we feel Georgia red clay under Eve Hoffman's bare feet on the dairy farm where she grew up; walk with her though an exhibit of one hundred and fifty postcards of lynchings. We see a girl in a yellow dress at the synagogue her great-grandparents founded--the synagogue bombed four hours later by white racists. We see black-faced jockeys in front yards. We listen to lullabies written in the Nazi concentration camps played on her mother's piano--and the realization her mother, a fifth-generation Southern Jew, was pregnant with her as they were being written. We taste sweet-potato pies and feel the wooden pews of churches turning their backs as gay men die. We watch giggling children dive from the top of the refrigerator into their father's arms and as young adults shovel dirt onto his wooden coffin. We accompany a widow rebuilding her life, finding a Mason jar for fireflies for her grandchildren.