Without You

As “a line of light falls across my eye. // one line of forgiveness then // was all that I could do,” Ditta Baron Hoeber inscribes loss and yet, in the delineation of that tension, that predicament, she also enacts a form of recovery and recognition that enlivens us all. This is a spare and deeply moving book. - Arthur Sze

"The world Ditta Baron Hoeber’s poems come from is a strange one. The poetry there is written in many languages – all of which she speaks fluently. She is the last remaining person to speak one other language from that place. I can think of no other way to describe this astonishing original work. The subjects of Without You are loss, love, ghosts, ceremony, celebration. There is always something of interest something more I want to know and so I keep on – in her words. These are the souvenirs and snapshots she has brought back with her. These fierce, dazzling, piercing poems are Ditta Baron Hoeber’s gifts to us." - Leonard Gontarek

In flashes of recollection, in flares of supposition and speculation, the fragments and fables of Ditta Baron Hoeber’s Without You trace the aftermath of a childhood trauma, with its attendant guilts and resentments and  mystifications, and simultaneously explore the “power of subtraction”: “there is so much space in my imagination,” Hoeber writes; and “this nothing is information.” Hoeber’s minimalist approach provokes the reader’s awareness of the reduction of memory into affect, of the “little remove” that paradoxically makes representation more telling than fact. Like the obsessive artist who constructs human figures from cardboard, dismantles them, then starts again; like the child who constructs and dresses ornate paper dolls, but never plays with them, Hoeber folds and refolds this past, offering us “little fists of song,” bringing us with her to “oh.” Terse, taut, gnomic, wrenching, and subtly evocative, Without You offers a compelling demonstration of a reality at once irrecoverable and irrevocable. - Nathalie Anderson