Book Review
Title: Water Strider
Author: Karen Hofmann
Publisher: Frontenac House
Released: 2008
Pages: 103
IBN-13: 978-1-897181-19-5
$15.95 CDN  

Reviewed By: Taryn Hubbard (Vancouver Correspondent - Canada) 

Karen Hofmann, in her latest collection of poetry Water Strider, exposes the often overlooked elements of daily life. Her speakers uncover old memories with a sharp, mature eye and the reader can trace their growth and development from past to present. Her poems are accessible, with language that is tangible, but her work is definitely not hollow. 

Hofmann starts off Water Strider with a detailed definition of how she is using "water strider" in the context of the book. She reveals that "water strider" is about duality, imperfect pairs, and walking the razor-thin line between different boundaries. The reader soon finds out that "water strider" does not just have significance as the title for the book, but her connotations of the word also serve as an overall theme for the entire work. Hofmann organizes her poetry in four sections: "Perk Test," A/versions of childhood," "Exile," and, of course, "Water Strider."

The voice in Hofmann's poems is calm and articulate, giving the reader a controlled outlook on the world she is describing. For instance, in the poem "A/Versions of childhood," she describes a young child who is tied to a high chair in an empty house as punishment for not eating their dinner. Hofmann divides this poem into ten numbered segments. The short segments may suggest the black-and-white learning of childhood, but with the speaker's interjections of what happened after the incident, the numbers also illustrate how people reorganize old memories in order to finally make sense of them. Hofmann's work is intriguing and interesting to read. 

Karen Hofmann's Water Strider is a part of Frontenac House's Quartet 2008. Other titles include Sharron Proulx-Turner's she is reading her blanket with her hands, Sheri-D Wilson's Autopsy of a Turvy World, and Richard Stevenson's Wiser Pills.