Helen Hofling

from Tender the Night

Artist’s Statement

This collection takes its title from a famous novel, with a notable redaction. When “is” is cut out, “tender” is transformed from adjective—meaning caring, gentle, sweet—to verb: to tender is to offer, proffer, present. Night becomes currency. The collage-poems assembled here depend on just this style of phase change: excision reaping lateral transformation. The novel Tender is the Night redacts and reorganizes the experience of its muse, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald. These scraps muse on roaring nights, given and profited from, pilfering mass media, art, the vault of my life and the lives of near ones, poking around the basement of theft and offer.

Helen Hofling writes, collages, and teaches in Baltimore, Maryland. Her work can be found (or soon will) in Berkeley Poetry Review, The Columbia Review, Hobart, PANK, Prelude, Winter Tangerine, and elsewhere.
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About Posit Editor

Susan Lewis (susanlewis.net) is the Editor-in-chief and founder of Posit (positjournal.com) and the author of ten books and chapbooks, including Zoom (winner of the Washington Prize), Heisenberg's Salon, This Visit, and State of the Union. Her poetry has appeared in anthologies such as Walkers in the City (Rain Taxi), They Said (Black Lawrence Press), and Resist Much, Obey Little (Dispatches/Spuyten Duyvil), as well as in journals such as Agni, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions online, Diode, Interim, New American Writing, and VOLT.

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