People Once Real
Poetry by Richard Hoffman
$18.00
“In People Once Real Richard Hoffman, very much a later-day Jacob, wrestles for the souls of lost souls, himself very much included. This task is arduous, strenuous; the stakes speak to whether honesty has any chance in a world that has sold itself to various glowing forms of emptiness and cant, to say nothing of predatory malevolence. Hoffman is part of an honorable tradition that includes Vallejo and Tennyson, poets who met grief head on, but never gave up on the lyric gift that is the beautiful, unreasoning heart of the loving life-force, a force sadly traduced again and again, as Hoffman eloquently attests, but still adamant, even if, at this point in time, its vitality feels tragic. This is a genuinely powerful book.”
—Baron Wormser
About the Author
Richard Hoffman has published four previous 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; and Noon until Night, which received the 2018 Massachusetts Book Award for Poetry. His other books include the celebrated memoirs Half the House and Love & Fury, the story collection Interference and Other Stories, and the essay collection Remembering the Alchemists and Other Essays. He is Emeritus Writer in Residence at Emerson College and Nonfiction Editor of Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices.
