Description

If Anton Chekhov returned as a modern-day poet, Richard Hoffman would be his name. His poems reverberate with the same lucid witness and precision. Bridging histories local and cultural, they draw on literary traditions while simultaneously heralding experiment and invention. Both rooted and transcendent, Emblem is a marvelous new book.
—Terrance Hayes

Richard Hoffman is a fiercely gifted poet whose stanzas revel in the infinite possibilities of language, and jolt, surprise, and satisfy at every turn. Each syllable in Emblem is stamped with the poet’s signature, a heady combination of skill, vulnerability, and unerring wit. This is work to be savored and embraced.
—Patricia Smith

Richard Hoffman earns highest praise for brilliantly resuscitating emblems, a genre that flourished from the Renaissance until the 19th century…
—Seymour Slive

Richard Hoffman is the author of the poetry collections Without Paradise and Gold Star Road, winner of the 2006 Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the 2008 Sheila Motton Award from the New England Poetry Club, as well as Half the House: a Memoir. A fiction writer as well, his Interference & Other Stories was published in 2009. He is Writer-in-Residence at Emerson College and currently serves as Chair of PEN New England.