From the richness of daily life...[Hoffman] constructs a temple to desire’s shifting moods and meditates on the complications of loving and being loved ... Hofmann continues to mine his fascination with the ancient world, classical music, nature, and art ... In A Hundred Lovers, it’s the conquest of the feverishly wanting body that takes center stage ... These new poems are thrillingly, deliciously frank ... The exorcism of shame from gay sexuality and especially penetration is crucial to Hofmann’s project ... The progression of this book, in which lovers turn endlessly towards the speaker and then away, forms a jagged landscape, like the edge of any potsherd looking for its other half ... Hofmann’s use of the past tense in this poem contributes to its elegiac tone and adds poignancy to the final lines.

While 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.

There’s something especially beautiful and necessary about Richie Hofmann’s A Hundred Lovers ... Wandering through this collection is similar to a luxurious meander through one’s favorite museum, with the plentiful white space on the pages framing the poems literally and figuratively ... His explorations—like the mythologies—aren’t cherubic, instead embracing both darkness and light. These poems are earthy and multisensory ... There’s a beautiful dreaminess to many of these poems, which is not to say that the language isn’t precise ... Hoffman is especially adept at linking the personal and the historical, turning the lens both inward and outward, and these poems offer artistic and emotional renderings in a temporally expansive manner ... In classical sculpture, as well as poetry, there’s an idealization of form and perfection, but Hofmann is especially interested in the fractures and edges of art and love, those that may make form even more beautiful in their singular nature.

Richie Hofmann’s second poetry collection, A Hundred Lovers, and the experience of reading it, can be best described as a reverie, a state of pleasantly sinking in one’s thoughts as a daydream ... Readers of his revered debut Second Empire will recognize the economy of language and subtle sonic threads he uses to construct this world—a style that differentiates him from his contemporaries, as seemingly quieter than those who prioritize pronounced experimentation and as more affectively difficult than those who prioritize accessibility. Readers will also appreciate how his voice has developed in a collection that feels more concretely grounded on the personal pronouns 'I' and 'we' and more personally invested in desire, time, nature, and art ... Hofmann’s poems impart more than desire to the reader. They present, communicate, and bestow an idleness, especially when they don’t focus on brief sexual encounters but on the permanence of a single romantic one ... At a time when contemporary poetry often seeks affective responses that are limited to major emotions such as anger, sadness, happiness, and hope, Hofmann’s poetry expands the repertoire ... Hofmann proves that he does not only engage with this global lineage but has substantially contributed to it, engaging with desire, male beauty, and the body, through senses and seasons, in ways that readers of the 21st century will find irresistible.

It is from this lineage of both the pleasures of a more whimsical ekphrasis and the epiphanies of a more dialectical ekphrasis that Hofmann’s art-soaked poetry emerges ... Hofmann’s immense love of art, like his more carnal erotic entanglements, engorges his poetic imagery, deepening the mood and meaning ... showcases a scopophilic love of looking at images and an exhibitionist love of being seen as image. And because Hofmann is so image conscious, these poems ooze with sexuality ... There are moments when the sexual frankness doesn’t work—not because of its candor but because sexual description is not poetry in itself; it needs as much transubstantiation through metaphoric connection, crisp juxtaposition, and/or sublime lyricism as do descriptions of sunlight, foliage, and seawater. Sometimes this happens when the image becomes too concrete ... However, even the lines that don’t shimmer create a kind of tense balance when situated next to the more purple poesy.

Sensuous ... Just as Hofmann’s book bears witness to the richness of sexuality, it also explores the entrapments of shame, the devastation of heartbreak, and the difficult emotional work that relationships require ... This offers an entrancing testament to the pleasures and pains of human connection.