Two Major New Collections from Richard Hoffman To Be Published September 15th, Representing a Landmark Moment in an Extraordinary Career
Poet, memoirist, and essayist Richard Hoffman—author of nine acclaimed books—will release two companion volumes: Each Child a Disappearance: New & Selected Poems (1972–2025) and Mundus et Infans: New & Selected Suites, Sequences, & Series.
Published together as a matched set, these books present more than five decades of Hoffman’s poetry, bringing into one place the astonishing range, moral force, and lyrical power that have shaped his reputation as one of our most essential contemporary poets.
A Half‑Century of Witness, Lyric Intelligence, and Moral Imagination
Across these two volumes, Hoffman’s work engages the private and the public with equal clarity: family, labor, childhood, trauma, love, desire, democracy, war, and the ongoing struggle to remain fully human in an age that tests our humanity at every turn. His poems—praised by writers such as Terrance Hayes, Patricia Smith, Molly Peacock, Afaa Michael Weaver, Linda McCarriston, Richard Blanco, and D. Nurkse—are known for their psychological insight, historical consciousness, and commitment to truth-telling without sentimentality or self‑deception.
Terrance Hayes writes, “If Anton Chekhov returned as a modern-day poet, Richard Hoffman would be his name.”
Patricia Smith calls him “a fiercely gifted poet whose stanzas revel in the infinite possibilities of language.”
Richard Blanco praises his lyric voice as “both utterly intimate and wisely oracular… reimagining elegy for our time.”
About Each Child a Disappearance
Spanning the years 1972–2025, Each Child a Disappearance gathers Hoffman’s most celebrated poems alongside new and previously uncollected work. This volume includes selections from Without Paradise; Gold Star Road; Emblem; Noon until Night; and People Once Real as well as powerful new poems confronting grief, violence, ecological collapse, democracy’s fragility, and the obligations of witness. Many of Hoffman’s most widely taught and anthologized poems appear here, along with late work of profound spiritual and emotional clarity.
About Mundus et Infans
Where the first volume presents individual poems, Mundus et Infans collects Hoffman’s long-form suites, sequences, and serial poems—book-length arcs of thought and feeling in which he explores myth, memory, art, philosophy, and history at scale. These extended works map the structures beneath experience: the stories we inherit, the archetypes we repeat, and the imaginative frameworks through which we make meaning. Together they offer a sustained meditation on childhood, catastrophe, and the lifelong labor of consciousness.
Two Volumes in Dialogue
Though each stands alone, together the books reveal the full architecture of Hoffman’s poetic life: the lyric and the narrative, the personal and the political, the elegiac and the visionary, the intimate poem and the sweeping sequence. This paired publication is both a culmination and a new beginning—an invitation to read Hoffman’s work as a single, evolving project committed to clarity, compassion, and moral courage.
About the Author
Richard Hoffman is the author of five collections of poetry, including Gold Star Road (winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the Sheila Motton Award) and Noon until Night (winner of the 2018 Massachusetts Book Award), as well as the celebrated memoirs Half the House and Love & Fury, the story collection Interference and Other Stories, and the essay collection Remembering the Alchemists. His writing has appeared in Agni, Poetry, Harvard Review, Consequence, PN Review (UK), The Hudson Review, The Manhattan Review, Witness, World Literature Today, and many other journals. He is Emeritus Writer in Residence at Emerson College and nonfiction editor of Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices.
Availability
Each Child a Disappearance and Mundus et Infans are available either separately or together as a coordinated two-volume set from the publisher. For review copies, interviews, readings, or events, please contact the publisher at https://lilypoetryreview.blog/contact/ or the author directly at rchoffman@comcast.net
RICHARD HOFFMAN 
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