Second Empire - Softcover

Hofmann, Richie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1938584163 ISBN 13: 9781938584169

Publisher: Alice James Books, 2015

Synopsis

"The delicate arc of these poems intimates--rather than tells--a 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, Hofmann's poems break through their own beauty." -- Rosanna Warren
This debut's 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 others--other times, other places--in order to understand aesthetic pleasures the speaker craves. Distant and formal, the poems feel both ancient and contemporary.
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. He received his MFA from Johns Hopkins University and is currently a doctoral student in English at Emory University.

About this title

About the Author

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.

Review

"Even more seductive than the preternatural elegance of these poems is the fact that Richie Hofmann inhabits that elegance truly as a style, a way of perceiving the world in which clarity and ornament are the same thing."--James Longenbach

"With what unerring ease Richie Hofmann's Second Empire unfolds its complex terrains. As they explore the difficult and necessary question of how to both refuse and use the inherited 'city of our ancestors,' these taut poems face fear and desire unflinchingly; they are poised, supple, and unnervingly alert."--Mary Szybist

"Through variations on the sonnet, Hofmann obsesses over what has been, in a debut collection that feels like a lost manuscript of early modernism... Hofmann shares [Hart] Crane's formal tightness, sensuality of language, and obsession with love and history and how they relate to being modern. But to call him a mere Crane acolyte would diminish Hofmann's talents... Hofmann is relighting the torch that Crane extinguished when he committed suicide by leaping into the sea; he is taking the sexual longing that permeated Crane and laying it bare."   -- Publishers Weekly
 

"The delicate arc of these poems intimates--rather than tells--a 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, Hofmann's poems break through their own beauty." -- Rosanna Warren

"[Richie Hofmann] possesses an Old World eye, like a character out of Henry James, raised in our era...Hofmann's language is lush in its accuracy and sensuous in its silences. Eros hums through the poems."--The Tupelo Quarterly

About this edition

• Publisher: Alice James Books
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1938584163
• ISBN 13: 9781938584169
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 100