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  • Published: 8 February 2022
  • ISBN: 9780593551189
  • Imprint: RH US Audio Adult
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $23.00

A Hundred Lovers

Poems





An erotic journal in poems, from a rising star in the American poetry scene, author of the highly acclaimed collection Second Empire. “A book of love poems that consciously and subversively hearken back to Shakespeare’s sonnets, marking Hofmann’s position as one of our necessary poets of erotic desire.” —Jericho Brown, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Tradition

An erotic journal in poems, from a rising star in the American poetry scene, author of the highly acclaimed collection Second Empire.

“A book of love poems that consciously and subversively hearken back to Shakespeare’s sonnets, marking Hofmann’s position as one of our necessary poets of erotic desire.” —Jericho Brown, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Tradition

A Hundred Lovers is a catalog of encounters, sublime, steamy, and frank. Inspired by French autofiction, the poems feel both sharp and diaristic; their lyrical, intimate world brings us everyday scenes imbued with sex. "Eros enters, where shame had lived," the speaker observes, as the poems explore risk and appetite, promiscuity and violence, and, in the wake of his marriage, questions about monogamy and desire.

Bringing us both the carefully knotted silk ties of the wedding pair and their undress in a series of Hockney-like interiors where passion colors every object, Hofmann speaks plainly of the saliva, tears, and guts of the carnal, just as he does of the sublime in works of art. A Hundred Lovers invites us to consider our own memories of pleasure and pain, which fill the generous white space the poet leaves open to us between his ravishing lines.

  • Published: 8 February 2022
  • ISBN: 9780593551189
  • Imprint: RH US Audio Adult
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $23.00

Praise for A Hundred Lovers

  • "These taut poems face fear and desire unflinchingly; they are poised, supple, and unnervingly alert."--Mary Szybist
  • "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... he is taking the sexual longing that permeated Crane and laying it bare." -- Publishers Weekly
  • "Recalling in equal parts the work of Elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill, Carl Phillips and Henri Cole, these poems nevertheless stand apart from their influences, painting with delicate strokes, simultaneously concealing and revealing their concerns.With these remarkable poems, Hofmann truly transcends the “debut” label." --American Literary Review
  • "[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
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