RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksWhile A Hundred Lovers has been billed by its publisher as “an erotic journal in poems,” this framing — though not wrong exactly — belies the formal \'compression\' and \'indirect approach\' that inform nearly every line of this excellent collection ... Throughout A Hundred Lovers, Hofmann often appears, at a poem’s outset, to offer us a comprehensive account of a sexual encounter — only to leave us, at the poem’s end, back in the beguiling dark that both precedes it and proceeds from it ... Hofmann’s poetry attempts to bring together resonant history and what that history has sought to keep apart: namely, the male lovers who populate his every poem ... To read A Hundred Lovers, then, is to read not just an account of a body in the various stages of love...but also of a body as it revels in the world around it. As they traverse specific streets in Germany and France, Hofmann’s poems come to resemble, collectively, a kind of travelogue ... Maybe the point, for Hofmann, is not the final color per se but rather the act of mixing the colors — of poetic making, of poesis — which, like time or history or memory itself, is never really finished.
Shane McCrae
RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksRacial injustice, economic inequality, simple human cruelty—McCrae addresses all of these subjects, these facts of the world, head-on—while, like Dante, transposing the literal into the otherworldly ... Sometimes I Never Suffered uses its celestial motif not to escape this world but rather to bring it into sharper focus ... In the wrong hands, this sweeping flyover of human history might be too big to chew. But McCrae has no designs on totality: these moments are lyrical flashes, not summarizing instance ... One of the most paradoxical figures in American history—and perhaps the most compelling creation in contemporary poetry—Jim Limber speaks, often, in a voice that blurs the line between his own and McCrae’s. Even without an eye to the biographical synchronicity that, one guesses, must have drawn McCrae to Limber’s figure initially, Limber becomes—in this sequence—a kind of lyric mask ... These moments add up to a coherent vision—though by \'coherent\' I don’t mean that they lack in conflict or paradox. At times it can feel as though McCrae works exclusively in the realms of paradox, double meaning, and oxymoronic play ... But McCrae’s penchant for paradox doesn’t amount to self-canceling opposition; rather, it seems, often, like the only way forward after such suffering.
Rowan Ricardo Phillips
PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksWhile Living Weapon takes risks its predecessors didn’t—none greater than the two prose sections that bookend the collection—the poems build, for the most part, on the foundation laid in the previous two books ... Over and again, Phillips strives—within his own poems—to chip away at an explicit definition of what exactly we mean when we say \'poetry\' ... This kind of intellectual funhouse can be, at turns, both exhilarating and wearisome—like looking through an infinity mirror ... This blend of tradition and individual talent astonishes in both its intensity and restraint ... Rowan Ricardo Phillips works...with an acuity of mind and ear that invites his reader to join him in the joy (and pain) of discovering what a full awareness of time brings. As with many daring impulses, Phillips’s constant shuttling between centuries can, every so often, lead him astray ... Still, Phillips’s desire to meet us where we are—surrounded by the noise of campaign slogans and epic similes alike—leads to some of the collection’s highest-soaring moments.
Robert Hass
PositiveOn the SeawallThough this proclivity for second-guessing can become, at times, tiring — or, worse, merely performative — Hass’s most-successful poems know exactly when to yield authority and, importantly, when to wrest it back ... Here we find Hass at his best: writing in praise of what surrounds him most immediately ... Moments like this one—in which Hass steps back from the scene and allows it to breathe on its own — are where Summer Snow reaches its highest points ... These instances of delightful discovery make a handful of the poems — perhaps inevitable in a book as long as Summer Snow — frustrating in their absence of immediacy...regrettably, these moments end up as mere ornamentation to a poem whose structure struggles to contain the jotted-down anecdotes, magazine quotations, and statistics it’s been asked to hold ... Like the answers to Summer Snow’s many, disparate questions, local and existential alike — desire remains, at the end of this poem, where it’s always been: receding into \'the distance,\' never quite in hand, but never — importantly — entirely out of reach.
Edgar Kunz
PositiveOn the SeawallKunz resists, in these spare lines, the temptation to draw some larger moral from the moment, and instead allows what’s left unsaid — between his father and the speaker, between the lines themselves — to hover at the edges of meaning...This impulse — to resist the declarative \'message\' inchoate in Kunz’s memories — is laudable ... This ability — to transmogrify a familiar phrase or word into something unknown — stands as one of Kunz’s major talents ... In a book so concerned with hands, the disassociation between the speaker and his hand grows into a larger fissure — between present and past, adulthood and childhood, even poiesis and physical labor ... In Kunz’s transformative imagination, even blood undergoes a kind of poetic alchemy, becoming first \'alien,\' and then a currency of rare and precious value.
Ilya Kaminsky
PositiveLos Angeles Review of Books\"Deaf Republic shares with Joyce’s works, too, a certain difficulty that rewards close (and multiple) readings. But this difficulty is the book’s strength — on levels both poetic and political ... I’m tempted to say I wish the book had ended [earlier]... But a final poem — \'In a Time Of Peace\'— serves as a kind of bookend-sequel to [the first poem]. Unfortunately, without the lens of fictional narrative, much of this last poem feels like being tapped repeatedly on the shoulder and asked whether we’ve “gotten” the book’s analogy between Vasenka and contemporary America ... Deaf Republic is a masterfully wrought collection, and this last stanza [of the book] does justice to every line that precedes it.\
