Barrow Street 2006 Prize Winner

In October 2009, The New England Poetry Club selected Gold Star Road for the Sheila Motton Award for the best book of poetry published in the past two years! Please see http://www.nepoetryclub.org/

With range, craft, and a dreadful curiosity about how human beings work, Richard Hoffman gives us Gold Star Road. Gold Star—an apt title for this collection, my hands-down favorite for the Barrow Street Prize 2006. Hoffman’s poems tap into moments when civilization dissolves, not superficially, but at its emotional roots. Simply reading this book becomes an engaged, passionate experience. Time and again through the poet’s weary irony comes the bite of life. In short lyrics like “Refugee,” “Psalm,” and “Humility,” and in longer lyrics like “Founder’s Gallery” and the title poem, “Gold Star Road,” he makes the world seem, in the words of Wislawa Szymborska, whom he quotes: “just a room away.”
—Molly Peacock

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ISBN: 9780972830270