Description
The delicate arc of these poems intimatesrather than tellsa love story: celebration, fear of loss, storm, abandonment, an opening forth. Richie Hofmann disciplines his natural elegance into the sterner recognitions that matter: I am a little white omnivore, the speaker of Second Empire discovers. Mastering directness and indirection, Hofmanns poems break through their own Warren
This debuts spare, delicate poems explore ways we experience the afterlife of beauty while ornately examining lust, loss, and identity. Drawing upon traditions of amorous sonnets, these love-elegies desire an artistic and sexual connection to othersother times, other placesin order to understand aesthetic pleasures the speaker craves. Distant and formal, the poems feel both ancient and contemporary.
Antique Book
The sky was crazed with swallows.
We walked in the frozen grass
of your new city, I was gauzed with sleep.
Trees shook down their gaudy nests.
The ceramic pots were caparisoned with snow.
I was jealous of the river,
how the light broke it, of the skein
of windows where we saw ourselves.
Where we walked, the ice cracked
like an antique book, opening
and closing. The leaves
beneath it were the marbled pages.
Richie Hofmann is the winner of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the New Yorker, Poetry, the Kenyon Review, and Ploughshares. A graduate of the Johns Hopkins University MFA program, he is currently a Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry at Emory University.
Author: Richie Hofmann
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Alice James Books
Published: 11/03/2015
Pages: 100
Weight: 0.3lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.40d
ISBN: 9781938584169
Language: English
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