The Hello Delay [Hardcover]

The Hello Delay asks what happens around the saying of a thing and the receiving. Inside and outside of our daily communications, there are events, there are silences, d?j?-vus, and intentions. These poems question the determined nature of our relationships to one another: What if this territory isnt familiar after all?

I Will Whisper
it to you so that someone else may hear it. whether or not its heard by you, whether or not I hear it myselfthat it is heard by a stranger.
stranger and stranger. get out the fires and fire hoses, put away the stars. daybreak breaks into noon breaks into after, and after is a song, and singing makes you calmer. thats okay but what are they saying down the street and lost on you, lost on you, lost on you.

In this human ecology, language is king. In this book, familiarity resides in memory or song, but perhaps nothing is so familiar as the experience of the present. What is it then to be present, when meaning persists among us? We are more than what we say and what we think, but these words are the lucite passages we travel to that aggregate.

In this place where understanding means being wrong together or just pretending to be right, Choffels poems honor the grandeur, the danger, and the mediocrity in manifesting what we make up as we go along. The Hello Delay might be experimental, but it is mostly experiential. It calls us out not to see how we will answer but to linger in the gaps of our refrain.

This book works with one of those serious beautiful struggleshow to be someone to something, in a world where I and thou are so often nothing to no one, where pronouns are disasters. We readers of poetry are uncertain animals, and, lucky for us, Julie Choffels poems get caught up in the filmy place between our uncertainty and our animality. Her work has both the delicacy and the ungainly chaos of forms emerging from raw materials curiously moving toward thinghood, following their vowels toward meal£