News & Events
from current issue of Soundings East
A Large Gray Area Richard Hoffman My friend, the Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, is singing to me. We’re in my study and across from me, in the other chair, he is singing a song he loves in Arabic. He has a beautiful voice and it’s clear to me that he enjoys singing. When I […]
Keynote, National Writers” Union Boston Annual Meeting, 2 February 2025
Thank you for having me here, today. It’s entirely Charles Coe’s fault. Who can say no to Charles Coe? Raise your hand if you can say no to Charles Coe… I didn’t think so. Anyway, bear with me, I just got new glasses. It had been about 7 or 8 years since my last prescription […]
ARBOR VITAE, An essay from Remembering the Alchemists
“Trees are Earth’s endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.” — Rabindranath Tagore My neighbor across the street wants to cut down the tree in the front of her house; she says its roots are compromising her foundation, and besides, she wants more sun so she can grow flowers in her front […]
Inter-Review
The Intimacy of The Personal essay Richard Hoffman and Steven Harvey Steven Harvey, The Beloved Republic Wandering Aengus Press, 2023. 228 Pages, Paper, $20.00 Richard Hoffman, Remembering the Alchemists The Humble Essayist Press, 2023. 270 Pages, Paper, $19.00. Richard Hoffman [RH]: I’m eager to talk with you about our two books in relation […]
I thought of this poem almost as many times this week as children died of starvation in Gaza
“SO WHAT” Here is a tiny weapon, devastating, undetectable. Here is the switch to turn off the world. The demise of an ancient question; the voice no longer rises, and a black hole, antimatter, widens like a desperate pupil in the sudden dark.
Richard Hoffman’s eleven books include the memoirs Half the House, winner of the Boston Athenaeum Reader’s Award and Love & Fury, a finalist for the New England Independent Booksellers Award. He has published five books of poetry, Without Paradise; Gold Star Road, winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the Sheila Motton Book Award from The New England Poetry Club; Emblem; Noon until Night, winner of the 2018 Massachusetts Book Award, and his most recent, People Once Real. His other books include the story collection Interference and Other Stories, and the 2023 essay collection Remembering the Alchemists. His work, both prose and verse, appears in such journals as Agni, Consequence, Harvard Review, Hudson Review, The Literary Review, The Manhattan Review, PN Review (UK), Poetry, Witness, World Literature Today and elsewhere. In September, Lily Poetry Review Books will publish two volumes of his New & Selected Poems, Each Child a Disappearance, and Mundus et Infans: Selected Suites, Sequences, and Series. He is Emeritus Writer-in-Residence at Emerson College, and Nonfiction Editor of Solstice: a Magazine of Diverse Voices. His website is richardhoffman.org
Reviews
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.
Terrance Hayes, Poet and educator. Winner of the National Book Award
Richard Hoffman is a fiercely gifted poet whose stanzas revel in the infinite possibilities of language, and jolt, surprise, and satisfy at every turn. This is work to be savored and embraced.
Patricia Smith American poet, Spoken-word performer, playwright, author, and writing teacher. Winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets.
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.
Afaa Michael Weaver, Poet, fiction writer, and editor. Winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry
RICHARD HOFFMAN 