Decades in gestation, the riveting, poem-memoir THE GATES OF PEARL is woven together from a mother's Overeater's Anonymous journal written in the 1970s, mother-daughter telephone conversations, and the poet-daughter's exquisite verses... And here is the mother-daughter relationship with Pearly confessing her most private self to her grown child over the telephone. No attempt is made to prettify the mother's fragments and idiosyncratic stream-of-consciousness. Too much of Pearly's shimmering originality, her lyricism, and transgressive voice would be lost. Taboos of silence are broken. I leave the bed—I go towards an icy box—holding out its frozen breasts and erect Penis to me. The daughter responds in meticulous, impassioned verse that provides a counterpoint to the mother's flying-off-the-shelves imagery. Chiseled, Sappho-like in places, unscripted free-style in others, The Gates of Pearl is an impassioned lament of dark beauty. It is also a celebration. Listen to Pearly: My eyes were riveted on the huge banana trees... Lo and behold thru the dark purplish large leaves right before our eyes like a birthing came the stalk of bananas. I had seen Nature's unabashed sexual blaze of glory—an erection. -- Stephanie Emily Dickinson

There is no other poem on the face of the planet like this one. This is a poem that will blow the top of your head off. This is a poem in which the past is present and the present is in the past, because this poem makes the past seem so contemporary that the present feels less immediate. This is a poem written by the poet's mother in her journals, and the poet and her mother in telephone poems, and the poet in her mysterious, lyrical poems. All the voices, past and present, mingling together in this book-length poem creates a sound as piercing and clear as a scream. This is not a howl. This is a scream - a fantastic, feminist scream grounded in eating disorders, sexual frustration, divorce, failure, the difficulty of motherhood, profound disappointment and despair where the only hope is the truthfulness of the narrator, the goodness of her daughter, the determination of both of them, and the beauty of poetry. You want to read this poem despite its hard truths, because it is unlike anything you have ever read before. -- Dell Lemmon

Jill Hoffman's first book of poems, Mink Coat, was published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston in 1973. Her first novel, Jilted, was published by Simon & Schuster in 1993. She founded Box Turtle Press in 1983 and has since published 44 books: 24 issues of Mudfish, starting with Mudfish 1984 and 20 issues of Mudfish Individual Poet Series. Kimono with Young Girl Sleeves is Mudfish Individual Poet Series #20. Before that, Box Turtle Press published her collection black diaries (poems) in 2000 and The Gates of Pearl (a book-length poem) in 2018. In 2023, a second novel, Stoned, was published (Mudfish Fiction Series 1). She is also a painter and has painted the covers for many of these books.

Hoffman has a BA from Bennington, a Master's degree from Columbia and a Ph.D. from Cornell. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974 to 1975. She has taught at Columbia University, Brooklyn College, Bard, The University of North Carolina, The New School, and other institutions. Presently she teaches a Mudfish Writing Workshop on Zoom from her Tribeca, New York studio.

“This is a story of family and grief, a mother / daughter saga unlike any other, ambitious and relentless.”
— Philip Schultz, Pulitzer Prize Winner for Failure

"The Gates of Pearl is a brilliant mother-daughter narrative--an epic of the interaction of two women who love each other, criticize each other & both are mortally courageous! A must-read!"
— Erica Jong, Fear of Flying; Fear of Dying

"Hoffman names herself an amanuensis. She is transcriber of her mother’s sometimes agonized and sometimes delighted voice captured decades ago in telephone conversations, the collector of Pearl’s stream-of-consciousness Overeater’s Anonymous journals, and the writer of her own Daughter-of Pearl poems. The zeitgeist of the present moment invites the hybrid in our writing texts and so the 3 braided strands analogy (Telephone Poems, Pearly’s Journal, and Daughter-of-Pearl poems) that Hoffman uses to describe the book’s structure will find a receptive audience. The Telephone Poems are not only truly innovative—the term and concept coined by the author—but astonishing time capsules, rhythmic distillations, and rap-like in their intensity and humor."
— Stephanie Emily Dickinson

"I have read your extraordinary poem. Pearly’s voice is so strong in it, I can hear her speaking. It is shocking, lacerating, devastating, heartbreaking, a perfect portrait of terminal longing. I don’t know how you survived living it or writing about it. You have written a remarkable testimonial to a ferocious spirit doing her best to come to terms with some of the hardest realities life provides. Through your poem, that spirit lives."
— Karen Tweedy-Holmes, Thought to Exist in the Wild; Horse Sanctuary

"There are two voices in Jill Hoffman’s latest book The Gates of Pearl. In many ways these voices both coalesce and duel with one another simultaneously. They alternate between Hoffman’s poetry and her mother Pearl’s poems and journal entries. Pearl passed away in 1979, but her voice rings through as if we were on the other end of the line in one of her Telephone Poems. The gates of Pearl open and close to a daughter whose love prompts her to explore and expose the depths of her own emotions by examining those of her mother. The book is somewhat of a call and response between two people who ponder relationships, the vagaries of life, and the frequently cruel circumstances of a shifting world. It employs dialog and monologue, inner reflection, plaintive outbursts and genuine moments of painful humor. Stark and brutally honest, we see that the umbilical cord stretches out infinitely while still binding us so very tightly to that maternal bond and source of a perpetually complicated symbiosis. It is fraught with the desire of connection and the need to separate. This conflict is evident in Portrait, a poem that aptly captures the dichotomy of the mother/daughter relationship, when Hoffman states, Our one soul/haggles for hours/on the phone… (P. 20, ll. 1-3), and in Venus observes: …my small feet are your hands (P. 33, l. 4)."
— Karen Corinne Herceg