Fault Lines of This World

Janice Weizman reviews Marcela Sulak’s “The Fault” and Carlie Hoffman’s “One More World Like This World.”

By Janice WeizmanMarch 19, 2025

• Poetry

OUR EMBODIED STATE means that we are always compelled, on some level, to contend with the concrete demands of our reality, the unrelenting here and now. One of the defining qualities of poetry is that, with nothing more than language, it enables us to transcend that embodiment and that reality, widening and deepening the paths to the underlying but essential truths that inform our every perception, and then deepening even those. Two new collections show this notion at work. Marcela Sulak’s fourth collection, The Fault, interrogates the rise and fall of her relationship with a man referred to as “F,” while Carlie Hoffman’s One More World Like This World explores her own artistic influences, from the Bible to mythology to the 20th-century writers—Borges, Yehuda Amichai, Virginia Woolf, Mary Oliver, and others—who shape and inspire her vision.

“It is not expression I long for / but the apple // just before. Imagine / believing what you know so forcefully // you will live this blizzard / all your life for this apple,” Hoffman muses in the poem “Borges Sells Me the Apple, Sells Me the World.” These lines bring together the key themes of the collection—the apple as a form of knowledge, the moment just before the fateful bite is taken, and the distillation of that moment: what is gained by knowing, and what is lost. But this title also exemplifies how Hoffman’s psyche is in dialogue with people who have impacted it. In this way, her poetry expresses an ongoing quest to locate the self as it muddles through the world.

Another recurring persona in the collection is that of the mythological figure of Eurydice, whose claim to classical fame is her attempted rescue from Hades by her husband, the lyre-playing Orpheus. The rescue ends badly, as, against the gods’ warning, Orpheus turns around to look at Eurydice before she has crossed out of the underworld, causing her to disappear forever. This brief episode marks Eurydice’s exit from history, but for Hoffman, this not knowing is what spurs her to reflect on the question of what happens when a woman is left alone, to her own devices.

In Hoffman’s rendering, rather than sadness or anger, Eurydice experiences something more nuanced and complex, as in these lines from “A Condo for Sale Overlooking the Cemetery in Kearny, NJ”: “You must imagine Eurydice / happy, that hell, too, / is an industrious world.” The juxtaposition of images—on one hand, the condo overlooking the cemetery, and on the other, the figure of Eurydice as an active participant in her own destiny—draws a strange, almost mystical connection between our current era and that of ancient Greece; modernity and myth, but with a difference. Hoffman’s Eurydice is not a passive, disappearing, figure, but a subject in her own right: “Eurydice knew / where she was going— […] She didn’t // leave the light / but swallowed it, / demanding a better song.”

Hoffman’s imagination is dynamic, vital, and constantly processing the ways in which events of the past mingle and cast their shadows over the present. The astonishing “Rose Ausländer, Jane Roe, & Me” juxtaposes the immortalized Roe (of Roe v. Wade fame) with the memory of the poet Rose Ausländer, whom Hoffman has translated from the original German, coming together in a recollection from high school:

                                                                         there is my friend C

        bleeding in the parking lot

                        of the high school                        during sixth period

        earth science class

                                                                                as we crowd the window

        her blonde hair                                flickering

                               like wind-caught snow,

        the teacher vanishing                                                down the hall,

        snow dissolving Jane’s

                                                                                          body on the pavement.

        How, as girls, no one

                    told us what was happening,            not with words but we felt

        the sirens

                                    as a kind of voice.

Ausländer was born and raised in Czernowitz (now known as Chernivtsi), a Moldavian city in a region of shifting borders that has, over the course of the 20th century, been part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Romania, the USSR, and, today, Ukraine; when the poem speaks of “cities made invisible,” Hoffman is perhaps thinking of places that continue to exist only in memory and visions: “I have // no place, but this small oracle, ash // from the synagogues, a gust of wind // ruffling the sheaves of paper.”

One More World Like This World reckons with the impulse, and even the imperative, to write—an act that serves as the subject of two poems with the same title: “Author’s Myth.” “Not every animal can survive this” Hoffman writes, and it’s not clear if by “this” she is referring to writing, to living, or to some more personal unnamed episode. “But there is a tree you cannot name. Its voice glows out of nature, you must / attempt / (because it can’t / be read), where / an ocean begins at the beginning and not every animal can.” Both of the “Author’s Myth” poems mirror and refract each other, their thematic and formal complexity opening numerous avenues for interpretation.

Hoffman was the recipient of a 2023 National Jewish Book Award for her previous collection, When There Was Light, while Sulak’s City of Skypapers was a finalist for that award in 2021. Like Hoffman, Sulak is also a translator; her last project, a Hebrew-to-English rendering of Orit Gidali’s collection Twenty Girls to Envy Me (2016), was long-listed for the 2017 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. While both poets take up a rigorous interrogation of the limits of language, the two collections differ in theme and content. Hoffman is interested in the self on its own, whereas Sulak seeks to observe and comprehend the self as it negotiates an intimate relationship with another.

The first line of The Fault’s opening poem, “Seed Bank,” looks back, as if trying to find an anchor in the past—“My parents could hardly get through breakfast / without mentioning sex”—and then goes on to muse, “To love is to learn new habits, with holes in them, // for a vole or a mole, they too hunger, for a seed / or surprise.” The poems that follow comprise a series of meditations on the difficulty, or perhaps the impossibility, of making room for another at the expense of what the self needs and expects.

From her first online meeting with “F,” through their marriage, to their eventual separation, Sulak is constantly gauging the terms and checking in with herself. The poems in The Fault play with the titular concept in its various iterations, and indeed, the notion of something flawed, cracked, problematic, and blameworthy casts a long shadow over their romantic partnership. All these connotations are present in the collection’s eponymous prose poem:

One morning on her way the wife felt a little fault nipping at her ankle. She bent to the path through the dry grass and there it was, all alone and lost. Whose fault are you, little one, she asked, but the fault just began to cry. […] And when the husband met her at the bend she said I have found your fault. You dropped it on the way to the public.

No, no, said the husband. This isn’t my fault. I am afraid it is yours.

To put the small, fraught moments of marital strife into poetic form constitutes a complex mapping of a couple’s particular dynamic. “The Cost of Art” succeeds in its narrative strategy of showing as a means of telling, capturing the constant keeping of accounts—financial, emotional, and adversarial—that often underlie the opaque patina of harmony:

To pay for a print that no one can see more than half of costs the same as half your new, top-quality refrigerator, I tell the man. He says I am the one paying for it, so I can do what I want. He says he’s just telling me what he thinks. I tell him I agree with what he thinks.

After two years it was clear that if we didn’t act, something would die. This is how a couple acts, he says. They get married. They bike mountains together. They buy art together. Why couldn’t I just say thank you and be happy when someone offers me a home, he asks.

As though channeling the vacillating emotions and ambivalence from within the marital framework, the tone of the poems is wise, irreverent, and questioning in a way that never sinks into wistfulness. There is a linguistic playfulness in how Sulak probes what is happening, as in the poem “F Takes a Fence”:

What on earth, inquired the wife, are you going to do with another fence?

I can’t yet say, said the husband, but how could I not take it? It was just lying there, he added, on the table, next to the butter knife and the idea of Russian braids. But husband, persisted the wife, where are you going to keep it? The cupboards are full of fences you’ve taken, we have no more room on the wall, and even the pillows are stuffed, she added, with fences.

“I spent an inordinate amount of time yesterday playing / with my boundaries, giving them baths, drying their fur, / giving them names and nuts,” Sulak writes in “The Boundaries,” and it seems that this is the heart of the matter, the essential question that the collection poses: What happens to the boundaries of the self when it enters into a relationship? How can the self preserve what is most essential to its survival? And what happens when the fault lines of a relationship harden?

Both Sulak and Hoffman set out to query some of our most quotidian realities, from urban decay and financial pressures to questions about the viability of male-female partnership and ruminations on the way that our self-chosen heroes shape the way we experience the world. Both expose the inherent confrontations between ideal and reality, between what one wishes for and what one has, and ultimately must make peace with. In this sense, they serve the age-old function of poetic expression: the possibility of transcending the limits of the here and now, and giving words and texture to the experience of parsing one’s place in the world.

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Featured image: Depth III by Avital Cnaani, from the cover of The Fault by Marcela Sulak.