Following his captivating and popular A Hundred Lovers, Hofmann’s new collection is a queer coming-of-age, tinged with myth: poems that bring us into a fever dream of antiquity and desire at its limits.
Recognizing the fragility of the body and soul in a world of threat, these startling poems stem from a central boyhood memory—the author’s near-drowning in a swimming pool on Crete. The observant child was troubled that none of the statues he saw had arms—and then it was his father’s arms lifting him from the water, saving his life.
Hofmann balances elegance and brutality as he explores the fables of that childhood as well as the contours of sex and relationships in modern cities, in order to write his own personal history of love and survival: “Masculine arms lifted me. / Masculine arms held me while I slept.” The poems navigate risks, abandonments, and rescues, moving through a series of mazes that become a labyrinth of erotic awakening, with quick turns and dangerous diversions. In poems that alternately sear and crush delicately, we wander the ruins where the self is lost and broken and ultimately reclaimed: at the dark center, in the heart of the past.
A triumphant follow-up to the fetching catalog of lovers in Hofmann’s last book, this collection thrills with its archaeology of self, its notes of austerity and decadence.
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Richie Hofmann is the author of three books of poetry--The Bronze Arms (2026), A Hundred Lovers (2022), and Second Empire (2015)--and the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His poetry appears in The Paris Review and The New Yorker, and he has taught recently at Stanford University and the University of Chicago.
Ryan Ruby is the author of Context Collapse: A Poem Containing a History of Poetry (Seven Stories Press, 2024) and The Zero and the One: A Novel (Twelve Books, 2017). For his essays and reviews, which have appeared in such venues as Harper's, Bookforum, and the New Left Review, he received the 2023 Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism. He is currently at work on a book about Berlin's Ringbahn, forthcoming from FSG in 2027.
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