Praise for Richard Hoffman
“Richard Hoffman has long been one of our most humane poets. His work reminds us that tenderness and moral imagination are not opposites of strength but among its deepest expressions. These poems stay with you because they continue asking what it means to live honestly with one another. They ask us to look more closely, love more deeply, and remain awake to one another’s lives. We would do well to accept that invitation.”
— Dzvinia Orlowsky, author of Those Absences Now Closest and recipient of the 2026 David Ferry and Ellen LaForge Poetry and Poetic Translation Prize
Gold Star Road (excerpt)
*
Our enemies proved their superior
brutality by torturing their children,
starving them, refusing them medicine,
raising them in ignorance and executing
them for crimes they could not understand.
We had no choice. We would have lost
had we not followed suit. We regret
all of it, but our walls
*
About the Author
Richard Hoffman’s eleven books include the memoirs Half the House, winner of the Boston Athenaeum Reader’s Award and Love & Fury, a finalist for the New England Independent Booksellers Award. He has published five books of poetry, Without Paradise; Gold Star Road, winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the Sheila Motton Book Award from The New England Poetry Club; Emblem; Noon until Night, winner of the 2018 Massachusetts Book Award, and his most recent, People Once Real. His other books include the story collection Interference and Other Stories, and the 2023 essay collection Remembering the Alchemists. His work, both prose and verse, appears in such journals as Agni, Consequence, Harvard Review, Hudson Review, The Literary Review, The Manhattan Review, PN Review (UK), Poetry, Witness, World Literature Today and elsewhere. In September, Lily Poetry Review Books will publish two volumes of his New & Selected Poems, Each Child a Disappearance, and Mundus et Infans: Selected Suites, Sequences, and Series. He is Emeritus Writer-in-Residence at Emerson College, and Nonfiction Editor of Solstice: a Magazine of Diverse Voices.
