Emblem
Poems by Richard Hoffman
Published December 15, 2011
order from Barrow Street Press
If Anton Chekhov returned as a modern-day poet, Richard Hoffman would be his name. His poems reverberate with the same lucid witness and precision. Bridging histories local and cultural, they draw on literary traditions while simultaneously heralding experiment and invention. Both rooted and transcendent, Emblem is a marvelous new book. - Terrance Hayes, author of National Book Award winner, Lighthead
Richard Hoffman is a fiercely gifted poet whose stanzas revel in the infinite possibilities of language, and jolt, surprise, and satisfy at every turn. Each syllable in Emblem is stamped with the poet’s signature, a heady combination of skill, vulnerability and unerring wit. This is work to be savored and embraced. - Patricia Smith, author of National Book Award finalist, Blood Dazzler
Richard Hoffman’s Emblem is an extraordinary book. Hoffman knows poetic forms, and he handles them deftly. His poems move beyond form to inhabit the places where our human selves reside, the country of the heart, the city of the mind. I admire this poet for his verve, and I follow where he leads. - Pablo Medina, author of The Man Who Wrote on Water
Richard Hoffman earns highest praise for brilliantly resuscitating emblems, a genre that flourished from the Renaissance until the 19th century. His point of departure is Andrea Alciati’s Emblematum Liber (1531), the earliest and most important emblem book. Like Alciati, Hoffman begins each with a motto, and the range of his subjects is broad, bearing on aspects of life that seem to be, in his words, “either immutable or peculiarly contemporary.” Readers will relish them, and all of Hoffman’s poems, and return to them time and again. - Seymour Slive, Professor of Fine Arts Emeritus, Harvard University; former Director, Harvard Art Museums
Interference & Other Stories
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“The stories in Interference are moving, wise, and bracingly unsentimental. Richard Hoffman writes about male sadness and vulnerability with unusual insight and tough-minded compassion.” – Tom Perrotta
“These stories of ordinary and extraordinary heartbreak investigate centuries-old themes with details that are at once familiar and surprising. Humorous or brutal, transgressive or redemptive, each story is full of wisdom and beauty.” – Kyoko Mori
“These stories are both funny and moving, wise without being pedantic, intelligent without being showy, and experimental without being precious. Richard Hoffman’s vision is wide and deep, and he evokes his characters with an artful grace that is a joy to read. Interference is a triumph!” – Andre Dubus III
New Rivers Press, 2009 – American Fiction Series
ISBN 978-0-89823-247-9 – $14.95
Gold Star Road
Poems by Richard Hoffman
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Selected for the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize
Winner of The New England Poetry Club’s Sheila Motton Book Award for best book of the previous two years.
“Hoffman’s poems tap into moments when civilization dissolves, not superficially, but at its emotional roots. Simply reading this book becomes an engaged, passionate experience. Time and again through the poet’s weary irony comes the bite of life. He makes the world seem, in the words of Wislawa Szymborska, whom he quotes: ‘just a room away.’” – Molly Peacock
“Hoffman is the poet traveling our nightmare of now, our descent into a lack of love for one another, but along the way he finds etchings of hope on the walls amid all the signs of a falling away from a center that has forgotten how to hold. Hoffman’s tropes and incantations invite us to shed a wisdom that has grown archaic so that we can begin to reclaim the genuine and live.” – Afaa Michael Weaver
“Poetry should be beautiful and dangerous, unforgettable, transformational, meaningful across academic and social borders. This is.” – Linda McCarriston
“Hoffman is a rarity among American poets; his premise is dialogic, his canvas vast, his stance self-questioning. This new book is breakthrough work; poetry of hard-earned grounding, profound integrity, and scalding, visionary intensity.” – D. Nurkse
Without Paradise
Poems by Richard Hoffman
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The poems in Richard Hoffman’s Without Paradise have been appearing with regularity in literary magazines and anthologies for years. In this long-awaited volume, Hoffman brings his signature blend of toughness and lyricism to bear on contemporary life, his and ours. In poems that address themes ranging from grief and mourning to political change and cultural criticism, the poet gives voice to the broad range of human concerns both social and existential.
Readers of Hoffman’s celebrated memoir Half the House will find in these poems the same intense clarity of vision, the same respect for the hard task of staying human, the same beauty and power.
“Richard Hoffman’s poems are quietly daring. In an era dominated by the ‘plain style’, he achieves formal elegance without stooping to mere facility. In an age of sometimes ponderous confessionalism, he dares to be funny (but never sardonic or facetious). Still these are poems of high aspiration and accomplishment, that contemplate large and deep issues with power and conviction.” – John Hildebidle
“The body of poetry has been desolated in our time by the radical estrangement of its flesh – emotion – from its bone – causation. Insights of the kind that drive Hoffman’s work have been relegated to “other disciplines” such as ethics or political science, as poetry has become the site of the anti-rational. These poems, in their grace, stamina, agility, are the marathoners who bring us brilliant, troubling news that must remake us.” – Linda McCarriston
“Without Paradise is a book full of joy & surprise & sorrow & wit — the very emotions and qualities that remind us we’re still alive and thinking. Richard Hoffman has stuck his own days and years into the fire and hammered a strong, compassionate, knowing voice out of them — a survivor’s voice — but he hasn’t forgotten how to laugh during the whole insane process. Open this up. Read some. You need what this book has.” – William B. Patrick
Half the House: a Memoir
by Richard Hoffman
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The headlines that followed the publication of this unflinching memoir provide stunning testimony of its power to move readers to empathy, outrage, and action: “Poet’s memoirs lead to arrest of alleged child molester,” “Author’s writing on abuse brings new victims forward.” Even before these events, however, the book had won the acclaim of critics such as Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post Book World who wrote, “Half the House offers heartening evidence, to borrow William Faulkner’s phrase, of the human capacity to endure and prevail.”
Against the back-drop of post-war, blue-collar America, Half the House tells a story both intensely personal and universal. Depicting his family’s struggles to care for two of his brothers who are terminally ill, Hoffman also recounts the horrific abuse he suffered in secret at the age of ten by his baseball coach. In a memoir Time magazine called “spare and poignant,” the author explores the ways in which grief and rage become a tangled silence that estranges those who need each other’s love the most, and demonstrates the healing power of truth-telling in both the personal and public spheres.
The celebrated memoir of boyhood, Half the House by Richard Hoffman, with a new essay by the author was published in Fall, 2005 by New Rivers Press in their Many Americas Rediscovery Series
ISBN: 0-89823-228-7 – $14.95
- “Hoffman makes very clear the complex encounter of his old life and his new one. There are no easy wrap-ups, no comforting bromides. But in the generational panorama we suddenly discern that a hard, brave victory has been achieved. The family saga has come full circle. Hoffman, sober, a father, has not only lived to tell the tale. He has worked to understand it and fashion it into art.” – Sven Birkerts in Then, Again: Aspects of Contemporary Memoir
- “Spare, poignant….” Time
- “Ultimately a story of love, reconciliation, and triumph over adversity.” – Library Journal
- “Compelling.” – Boston Globe
- A “moving boyhood memoir.” – Publisher’s Weekly
- “As stark and graceful as a bare winter tree.” Los Angeles Times
- “Half the House offers heartening evidence, to borrow William Faulkner’s phrase, of the human capacity to endure and prevail.” – Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World
- “A wonderfully written and heart-wrenchingly sad debut.” – Kirkus Reviews
- “A scorching account of the dark underside of family life. A powerful depiction of childhood as Purgatory and the scars left on the man who survives.” – Richard Selzer
Richard Hoffman’s work has appeared in Agni, Ascent, Harvard Review, Hudson Review, The Literary Review, Poetry, Shenandoah, Witness, and elsewhere, as well as in several anthologies. He has been awarded fellowships from the New Jersey Council on the Arts for poetry, the Massachusetts Artists’ Foundation for non-fiction prose, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council for fiction. He was a 2008 recipient of a Brother Thomas Fellowship Award from The Boston Foundation.
