East Axis: a second collection of poetry - Paperback

by Madison Hoff (Author)

East Axis is a book grounded in the metaphor of mapping: metaphorical, physical, and through memory. The poems are not confined to a linear journey but move in spirals, stumbles, and intuitive redirections. The core purpose of the collection is to navigate being: through grief, politicized chaos, and re-anchoring in the self and world. It maps the psyche and body in flux with personal, collective, and societal shifts.

While directionlessness is part of the terrain, the axis-East-suggests some sense of pull or magnetic return, a place we circle around, land, if only for a time before leaving, only to make our way back, again and again. Many of the poems question how do we find footing after spiraling? How do we stay still in a spinning world? Or spin in a still one? How does memory or mourning help us orient?

The journey is not following a traditional path but assembling a map from fragments, from poetic gestures that occasionally contradict, then align.