Memory & Complicity: Poems

In MEMORY & COMPLICITY, we feel Georgia red clay under Eve Hoffman's bare feet on the dairy farm where she grew up; walk with her though an exhibit of one hundred and fifty postcards of lynchings. We see a girl in a yellow dress at the synagogue her great-grandparents founded—the synagogue bombed four hours later by white racists. We see black-faced jockeys in front yards. We listen to lullabies written in the Nazi concentration camps played on her mother’s piano—and the realization her mother, a fifth-generation Southern Jew, was pregnant with her as they were being written. We taste sweet-potato pies and feel the wooden pews of churches turning their backs as gay men die. We watch giggling children dive from the top of the refrigerator into their father's arms and as young adults shovel dirt onto his wooden coffin. We accompany a widow rebuilding her life, finding a Mason jar for fireflies for her grandchildren.