Second Empire

"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.