Richie Hofmann — The Bronze Arms: Poems
Poet Richie Hofmann reads from his new collection, which moves between classical antiquity and contemporary desire with precision and formal elegance.
Why we picked this
Hofmann writes with a classicist's rigor and a lyricist's ear — poems that read Greek and Roman tradition as a living resource rather than a museum piece. One of the most formally accomplished poets working in English today.
Richie Hofmann is one of the most formally accomplished poets working in American letters. His previous collection, Second Empire, established him as a writer who could hold classical allusiveness and contemporary emotional directness in the same poem without losing either. The Bronze Arms continues and deepens that work, moving between ancient Mediterranean figures and the felt experience of love and the body with unusual precision.
Hofmann teaches at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the University of Chicago, and his poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, and elsewhere. He brings to antiquity the same quality of attention he brings to the present — an eye for the particular image, the turn that changes the meaning of everything before it.
A poetry reading is among the most intimate of literary events — the chance to hear a poem in the voice of the person who wrote it, which changes the work in ways a page cannot fully replicate. This evening at Union Market is for readers who know what they’re there for.