A Hundred Lovers

Praise for Richie Hofmann's A Hundred Lovers:
“Richie Hofmann writes about erotic love as the ancient Greeks envisioned it: an all-possessing force, a hammer that knocks you flat, simultaneously sweet and bitter, impossible to fight off, but also an organizing principle, a way of seeing and embracing the world . . . Thrillingly, deliciously frank . . . He constructs a temple to desire’s shifting moods and meditates on the complications of loving and being loved.” —Steven Tagle, BOMB

“Lyrical and steamy, unflinching and diaristic, Richie Hofmann’s book of love poems catalog everyday experiences and encounters imbued with sex. In A Hundred Lovers, Hofmann explores erotic desire and the complicated relationship between pleasure and pain.” —New England Review

“Expertly wrought . . . Hofmann’s poetry attempts to bring together resonant history and what that history has sought to keep apart: namely, the male lovers who populate his every poem . . . To read A Hundred Lovers, then, is to read not just an account of a body in the various stages of love (or, as in one poem: ‘the stages of life’) but also of a body as it revels in the world around it.” —Will Brewbaker, Los Angeles Review of Books

“This is a book you take in with your feeling body; it’s full of textures and scents, redolent with music and art. The speaker of these poems, hungry for beauty and brutality, seeks out connection while haunted by the inviolable singleness of the self. One finds an almost lost tradition channeled in these brilliant poems, and also a sensibility that makes tradition startlingly new.” —Garth Greenwell