Olly Olly Oxen Free - Paperback

by Angela Hoffman (Author)

The speaker in these poems has kept close company with spiritual contemplation. Some of these poems feel like prayers, and the speaker seeks to find and to be found. Sometimes we are grounded beautifully in the ordinary-boiling beets, hiking, gardening-and discover, along the way, the extraordinary. These quietly searching poems open the way to gratitude.

-Marilyn Annucci, author of The Arrows That Choose Us and the chapbooks Waiting Room and Luck

With childlike wonder, Hoffman finds holiness in the wren's morning song, an offering in buttercups, a chorus of frogs. In search of God, Hoffman's speakers admit to looking, "outside
myself in vain." These poems summon an internal game of hide and seek, proving that the search for God need not deviate from oneself to be fruitful.

-Jess L Parker, author of Star Things

Angela Hoffman's poems are stories of awakening to the "cracks and crevices of every day." She encounters the holy in familiar places: a hike in the woods, canning beets, watching chickens. She says "it lies in the practice" and for Hoffman, "to write is to pray." She is telling herself (and us) about delight while acknowledging the reality of messy places and contradictions; "pain and beauty, thorns and wishes." The poems invite us to listen for the still, holy voice, for the "secret bird language" in the daily wonder of the world. And all that is required: "showing up as me."

-Jeanie Tomasko, author of (Prologue) and dear little fist