Böcker av Wendy Hoffman

In Belonging, Wendy Hoffman focuses on a familiar American dialogue-the relationship between the Old Country and the New Country. The dialogue, fraught with silence and shame, occurs over the course of three generations. Much of the dialogue is physical and literally the food the generations consume. In her baking and cooking the grandmother embodies much Old Country Lore. Some of that wisdom is passed on, and, inevitably, much is lost-the tragedy known as "Time." We see in Hoffman's metaphorical flights and blunt perceptions (see her remarkable poem "My Public Life as a Piano" that nods to Bruno Schulz) women thrashing and trying to gain some meaningful footing. The emotional consequences are typically devastating and that is the pity and honesty of this brave book.-Baron Wormser, author of The History Hotel In this moving memoir of three generations of women, Hoffman is able to conjure individuals and eras with single sensory details: we hear the "sigh" of the "empty little paper cups" as the box of chocolates is passed around, we lick the "slender cage-like bars" of the beaters, we feel the "knots of sand" squeeze between our fingers to make drip castles-and then the metaphorical significance sinks in. Even as these poems expose the "coffin" of marriage and its abuses from a dry-eyed stance, their imaginative leaps "cry for what might have been different." -Rebecca Starks, author of Fetch, Muse In the /Preface to Belonging, Wendy Hoffman's second poetry collection, the poet forecasts what will follow: "...my grandmother sixty years in her coffin/her rugged hands still rolling out strudel dough..." But she "whom they did not find fetching" will "untwist/their tangled thoughts." Hoffman does exactly that in her memoir-like poems. Grandmother Bella "had to leave Belarus, like all the Jews" whose hearts became "a tribe of terrorized birds." But the "sulfurous wounds" of the past reemerge in America. Despite moments of redemption, Hoffman concludes "I spent most of my life knowing the truth and being told something else." These poems celebrate her victory over that protracted deception.-Angela Patten, author of The Oriole & the Ovenbird and other books

A Brain of My Own is about slavery, about brains stolen in childhood and before; brains that have been intruded upon, stopped, shrunk, paralyzed. We know about the history of people whose bodies were enslaved; but we know barely anything about the victims who appear free but whose brains are invisibly chained. Nor do we know about the international collusion, silence, and apathy that surround this kind of slavery.A Brain of My Own describes Wendy Hoffman's final years of attempting escape from the criminal mind control cult into which she had the misfortune of being born. This is her third memoir, and chronicles the final years of reclaiming her brain, including the ongoing abuse and torture during her recovery process. Hoffman describes the ways in which perpetrators manipulate the brain to create amnesiac barriers, methods held secret for generations. She exposes the duplicity of perpetrators functioning as normal people in the ordinary world and what is under their masks. She gives advice about how to spot seemingly helpful people who are actually out to destroy victims of mind control.This kind of dissociation is difficult to overcome, but the path back to full humanity is possible and happening.

The authors present the terrifying and horrible situations that children are exposed to as they are coerced into actions that go against their own beliefs and true natures. The cooperation of the two authors, client and therapist, based on mutual respect, serves as a model for every change process: solidarity, freedom, and equality