Dickinson dashed so that Hoffer could slash.-- "LetterNews"

In Fire Series, Kelly Hoffer writes 'pain's language is, / wretchedly, available to us.' And Hoffer also--brilliantly, deftly--summons forth the diction and syntax of other emotional and intellectual states. The language raves, huffs, trills, stutters, and scrutinizes. Interiority is tangible, dynamic. I was also awestruck by the book's structure: it, too, has its own grammar. These are inventive and indelible poems.--Eduardo Corral, author of Guillotine

Ingenious verbal and visual experiments. For a poet of such formal flair, Hoffer recognizes that the most daunting challenge may be restraint.-- "LitHub"

Reading Kelly Hoffer's Fire Series, I am reminded that Anne Carson, a poet as attentive to contradiction wrought within a feeling as Hoffer is, once declared in an interview: 'If prose is a house, poetry is a man on fire running quite fast through it.' And verse, as printing traditions go, is the field slashed and furrowed for that human life fleeing a feeling only to meet it at the exit of an expression. Composed as curious and patient acts of devotion, Hoffer's poems are evidence for how she has remained interested in her own grieving as a way of attending another's, and as a way of practicing the life-long arc of witness for the loss of both language and love that we all must learn. 'How, ' she asks, 'do I protect my mother from my lyric tendency?' This is a collection that frets between mute grief and vociferous, feral desire to envision these not only as adventures of cognition and the nervous system, but also as gauntlets thrown to a feckless language that betrays us at the slightest provocation. Hoffer has turned, here, an ear to those wailing sounds of weeping and ecstasy until they combust into music. Fire Series is ablaze with lyrical demonstrations that a thought can only warm us if it flickers between certainty and doubt.--Divya Victor, author of CURB

Full of leaps and contradictions, this is an inventive and lyrical work.-- "Publishers Weekly"

Longing is never out of reach, and recalibrating remains a constant. With fire, there is before and after, and Hoffer's poems refuse to deem one better than the other and instead probe the differences and their effects.-- "Interview with Pulp: Arts Around Ann Arbor"