Now available from Barrow Street Press. “In Richard Hoffman’s long, complex title poem, which anchors his concerns throughout the book, he says with characteristic lucid candor: “…now when longevity itself begins to seem at once/the only wealth worth having and the booby prize.” It should be noted that Noon until Night is not a book about noon until evening. Yet the darkness that night suggests has its rays of hope in it, as Hoffman artfully meditates on how we live and, without sentimentality, manage to go on. —Stephen Dunn, Poet and winner of The Pulitzer Prize
“Masterful and necessary…. What makes Hoffman so good at the memoir form is a rare combination of honest self-scrutiny, fairness, intellectual rigor, and emotional bravery. But what makes this book so important is what Hoffman excavates here layer by layer: how shaped and often shackled we are by the past, one that is bloody, racist, patriarchal, and as class- stratified as ever. —Andre Dubus III, author of Townie: A Memoir
Emblem: Poems
“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
“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
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.
“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
“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 The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again
Remembering the Alchemists
Remembering the Alchemists is a powerful and bracing collection of essays, a work of self-scrutiny and compassion, a work that seeks the linkage between public and private spheres in our culture of endless violence. Hoffman speaks for memoir—and other forms of art–as antidote to the “fictional distortion” about our history that clouds our sense of belonging. Memoirs may be our ongoing “truth and reconciliation hearings,” he writes. As his previous memoirs recount, his childhood was marked with the trauma of abuse and loss of two brothers who died “before we could be adults together.” And he understands that “killing people is the basis of the American economy.” Yet he is no catastrophist—and for this we can be grateful. His writing is a revelatory study in paying attention to the present and reframing the past so that the possibility of living a life of meaning and connection can be renewed.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Author of A Woven World: On Fashion, Fishermen, and the Sardine Dress
RICHARD HOFFMAN 
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