RICHIE HOFMANN is the author of Second Empire (2015), and his poetry has appeared recently in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The Yale Review. He teaches at Stanford University and lives in Chicago and San Francisco.
“[In A Hundred Lovers] the grit and sacrifice required to
understand the sense of beauty and sorrow are deftly captured in
the book, and his poetry is an endeavor of commitment to the
rendering and refinement of form. It's a work that encapsulates,
touching environment, carnal, psychic, and deeply erotic worlds.”
—Mark William Norby, Bay Area Reporter
“A Hundred Lovers, [Hofmann's] second collection, is ostensibly an
inventory of erotic encounters, but these billets-doux are marbled
with another form of love as well, one less carnal, though no less
cardinal: the aesthete’s passion for art and beauty . .
. Hofmann’s immense love of art, like his more carnal erotic
entanglements, engorges his poetic imagery, deepening the mood and
meaning.” —Tyler Malone, Poetry Foundation
“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
“Richie Hofmann’s second poetry collection, A Hundred Lovers, and
the experience of reading it, can be best described as a reverie, a
state of pleasantly sinking in one’s thoughts as a daydream . . .
Hofmann does not only explore the nature of (queer) desire but also
imparts an approximation of desire to the reader by always leaving
something to be carnally wanted, a backstory to the encounter, more
sequential details, a clearer resolution. At a time when
contemporary poetry often seeks affective responses that are
limited to major emotions such as anger, sadness, happiness, and
hope, Hofmann’s poetry expands the repertoire.” —Christos Kalli,
The Hopkins Review
“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
“Richie Hofmann is a modern-day troubadour, singing songs of the
erotic gay body and singing them well. The love poems in A Hundred
Lovers, inspired by French autofiction, are often candid in tone
and formal in shape, each modality lending the other both heat and
restraint, in the way that denim or cashmere, standing in the way
of a date’s roving hands, only serve to quicken the pulse of
desire. Put simply: this is a fucking hot book.” —Matt Ortile,
Esquire
“Hofmann presents love—that whirlpool, whirlwind, and wandering
emotion that makes life worth living and also ensures future
anguish—in its many shades from Eros to Agape. His
explorations—like the mythologies—aren’t cherubic, instead
embracing both darkness and light. These poems are earthy and
multisensory.” —Mandana Chaffa, Chicago Review of Books
“Consciously audacious, wonderfully deliberate . . . Hofmann
tactfully welcomes a new, dynamic inelegance, a kind of sideways
rhetorical turn toward authenticity, makes the nouns somehow
inexact, offhanded, or even lax, if I didn’t know better.” —Spencer
Hupp, The Cortland Reveiw
“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
“Sensuous . . . Catalogs the tastes, textures, scents, and sounds
of queer love, sex, and heartache . . . These are corporeal poems
that find their players yearning, yawning, aroused under a chestnut
tree, dressed in linens, fed on cheese and apples, mourning,
smelling of ferns . . . An entrancing testament to the pleasures
and pains of human connection.” —Publishers Weekly (starred
review)
“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
“Richie Hofmann chisels the excess away, brings to light splendid
language. His formal intelligence is ravishing, restless. Crackling
with vows and disavowals, studded with keen and elegant imagery,
simultaneously raw and curated, his poems remind us the flesh is as
curious as the mind. A Hundred Lovers is an unflinching and radiant
book.” —Eduardo C. Corral
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