Richie Hofmann Second Empire

Annotation

"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.