A Hundred Lovers

Richie Hofmann

“Ruins with Broken Bodies of Stone” – Writing about love and love-making – the pleasure, desire, passion, yearning, fear, lust, grit, tenderness – is the high-wire act of putting words on paper. Think how often you’ve seen it done poorly. Consider your own clumsy attempts to express such blurry, fleeting feelings with mere words. Richie Hofmann excels at combining the subtle with the blunt, in what is felt as well as in what is done. There are moments, observations, in these 42 poems that are delicate, fragile, when it feels like the whole book might melt into tears in your very hands. And other moments when you gasp, and hear yourself murmur, Well, yes.