Lived in Bars

Erica Hoffmeister's Lived in Bars is an exquisite road trip across America's still-feral landscapes and people. The poems are a woman's experience in lostness and finding: brutal and benevolent, in crisis and of tremendous grit. "There were certain things you lived with, and certain things you lived without." Perhaps this taut line best describes the push/pull and lived duality that Erica Hoffmeister writes about in Lived In Bars. There is an urgency to understand the past, home, and lives like that straddle the line of the academic and the tender of the bar, the patron and the daughter, the lover and the one who stands firmly and demands to be loved here, now, in this haze of smoke and with this traveling past. What I mean is Hoffmeister is standing at the edge of the poetic form, at the edge of past and future, at the red rocks in Utah and the wet trees by the ocean in Charleston, begging us to look closer at our seedy underbellies, our histories as they are, our drunken arms open on the road without denial, without shame, with sound and sense and the poetry in everything. - Tara Shea Burke, author of Animal Like Any Other (Finishing Line Press, 2019) bio: Erica Hoffmeister grew up in Southern California, but has been chasing that elusive concept of home since she witnessed the vast, east Texan sky bloom on her very first cross-country road trip at the age of seven. She is the author of the prize-winning chapbook Roots Grew Wild (Kingdoms in the Wild, 2019), holds an MFA from Chapman University, and teaches college English. She writes in a variety of genres, from poetry to creative non-fiction, flash and even young adult fiction, and has been published in several journals and magazines. She has received an honorable mention for the Lorian Hemingway Award for Short Fiction (2014), was named a runner-up for the Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize (2016), and has been nominated for Best of the Net. For now, she resides in Denver with her husband and two young daughters and perpetually misses home - wherever that feels like at the time. You can learn more about her and her work at www.ericarhoffmeister.com.