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 Hofmannis the winner of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in theNew Yorker,Poetry, theKenyon Review, andPloughshares. A graduate of the Johns Hopkins University MFA program, he is currently a Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry at Emory University.