“This book works with one of those serious beautiful struggles–how to be someone to something, in a world where ‘I’ and ‘thou’ are so often nothing to no one, where ‘pronouns are disasters.’ We readers of poetry are ‘uncertain animals’, and, lucky for us, Julie Choffel’s poems get caught up in the filmy place between our uncertainty and our animality. Her work has both the delicacy and the ungainly chaos of forms emerging from raw materials curiously moving toward thinghood, following their vowels toward meaning: ‘the topical, psychotropic battle’. The Hello Delay is teeming with animist music, animal motion, and human circumspection. Teeming.”
—Jared Stanley . . . Choffel's work doesn't present the material world, it presents all of its mysteries; it haunts you.
—The Brooklyn Rail
Julie Choffel's debut book of poems, The Hello Delay, welcomes us into a world where there is no repetition, instead endless iterations of the same connections, falling deep into the imaginative hole of existence. It is very quickly in the book that we realize that this is our world, too. Choffel softens this news, by letting us know from the get-go that this "poetry is not a camera." And no, this is not a poetry that simply captures the everyday like a camera, but instead generously gives us neverendngly gorgeous, breathtakingly beautiful manifestations of it. So, that we might approach life with sweetness and begin to appreciate the continuous mystery. And in doing so, we know that Choffel is a master poet, one who will guide us through this life and beyond it.
—Dorothea Lasky Exploring the concepts of familiarity and its force in our lives, The Hello Delay is not a read to overlook.
—Wisconsin Bookwatch