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The Bronze Arms: Poems
Not yet published
Expected 10 Feb 26Following on Hofmann's captivating and popular A Hundred Lovers comes a queer coming of age story tinged with poems that bring us into a fever dream of antiquity and desire at its limits
Observing the fragility of the body and soul in a world of threat, these startling poems stem from a central boyhood memory—the author’s near-drowning in a swimming pool on Crete. The observant child was troubled that none of the statues they saw had arms—and then it was his father’s arms lifting him from the water, saving his life.
Hofmann balances elegance and brutality as he explores the fables of that childhood as well as the contours of sex and relationships in modern cities, in order to write his own personal history of love and “Masculine arms lifted me. / Masculine arms held me while I slept.” The poems navigate primordial desire, risks, abandonments, and rescues, moving through a series of mazes that become a labyrinth of erotic awakening, with quick turns and dangerous diversions. In poems that alternately sear and crush delicately, we wander the ruins where the self is lost and broken and ultimately at the dark center, in the heart of the past.
A triumphant follow up to the fetching catalogue of lovers in Hofmann's last book, this collection thrills with its archaeology of self, its notes of austerity and decadence.
Observing the fragility of the body and soul in a world of threat, these startling poems stem from a central boyhood memory—the author’s near-drowning in a swimming pool on Crete. The observant child was troubled that none of the statues they saw had arms—and then it was his father’s arms lifting him from the water, saving his life.
Hofmann balances elegance and brutality as he explores the fables of that childhood as well as the contours of sex and relationships in modern cities, in order to write his own personal history of love and “Masculine arms lifted me. / Masculine arms held me while I slept.” The poems navigate primordial desire, risks, abandonments, and rescues, moving through a series of mazes that become a labyrinth of erotic awakening, with quick turns and dangerous diversions. In poems that alternately sear and crush delicately, we wander the ruins where the self is lost and broken and ultimately at the dark center, in the heart of the past.
A triumphant follow up to the fetching catalogue of lovers in Hofmann's last book, this collection thrills with its archaeology of self, its notes of austerity and decadence.
- GenresPoetry
96 pages, Hardcover
Expected publication February 10, 2026
2 people are currently reading
57 people want to read
About the author
Richie Hofmann
7 books62 followersRichie Hofmann’s new book of poems, A Hundred Lovers, is out now from Knopf. He is the author of Second Empire (2015), and his poetry appears recently in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The Yale Review. He teaches at Stanford University.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
October 27, 2025
Richie Hofmann is one of my favorite poets working today, so I was overjoyed to get an advance copy of his new collection, THE BRONZE ARMS. And it was everything I love about his poetry. He writes about desire, longing, decadence, and the body with stunning and sometimes even startling precision and insight. His poems are so evocative and visceral—sometimes brutally so, always beautifully. You feel them with your whole self. They move through you like fire.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
My thanks to the publisher for an ARC of this book. Now: SO GOOD. Soon: my review.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
“The Bronze Arms” and the Tender Violence of Memory: How Richie Hofmann Turns Desire Into an Archaeology of Being Held
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | February 7th, 2026
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
There is sand in the camera lens in Richie Hofmann’s “The Bronze Arms”, and the sand does what sand has always done: it abrades, it blurs, it refuses the clean outline. The image arrives early, almost offhand, but it reads like a private manifesto. Memory, in this book, will not behave. It will not preserve. It will not keep its edges. Instead, it returns as grit at the border of the frame, as a halo of distortion around the face you most wanted to hold still. Hofmann’s great subject is not simply desire, or myth, or the museum-lit seductions of marble. It is the compromised archive of feeling: how love survives as residue, how the body remembers in textures, how the past becomes an object you carry without ever being able to hold it properly.
Hofmann’s earlier “A Hundred Lovers” announced itself as a catalogue, brisk and erotic, a record of encounters that were both ecstatic and disposable. “The Bronze Arms” keeps the erotic engine but tightens the screws. These poems are more architectural, more haunted by the question of what lasts. The book moves through lust and cities and museums toward an older preoccupation: the urge to turn experience into artifact, and the dread of what happens when artifact replaces life. Hofmann is, at heart, a poet of surfaces who distrusts surface. He likes the hard and classical, the clean room, the cool authority of a beautiful object. He also knows that such authority is often a defense mechanism, the mind’s attempt to arrange the world so it cannot surprise you with catastrophe.
The contents page reads like a map, and like a warning. Titled poems sit beside bracketed fragments that feel like breath marks, or shivers, or the mind’s quick flashes when it cannot bear a full sentence. Asterisks punctuate the sequence like trapdoors. And a set of recurring “Maze” poems returns as if the reader has turned a corner and found the same corridor again, lit slightly differently. Hofmann is not building a linear narrative so much as an interior labyrinth, a system of repetition and rerouting in which desire and fear become indistinguishable. The book begins in heat. It lingers in bedrooms and on sheets and in the blunt choreography of bodies. It then turns, with the inevitability of weather, toward water. And from water it moves into stone, bronze, ruins, the long slow thought of history.
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
The early poems establish Hofmann’s peculiar tonal genius: the way he can be at once intimate and cool, confessional and curatorial. “Breed Me” could have been written as a fevered outpouring. Instead it arrives as inventory. The speaker tracks desire’s strange life cycle with an almost clinical steadiness: pain becomes habit, habit becomes craving, craving becomes boredom. That steadiness is what makes the poem feel dangerous. Hofmann understands something modern culture often forgets: erotic intensity is not the same as emotional safety, and danger can be mistaken for depth. The body learns quickly, sometimes too quickly, what will make it feel briefly invulnerable. The mind spends the rest of life translating that knowledge into something it can live with.
In Hofmann’s world, nearly every erotic moment is shadowed by restraint: wrists, teeth, belts, the body pressed into shape by another body’s will. Even when the poems are tender, their tenderness is edged with precariousness. A lover chews the speaker’s hair softly while he sleeps, and the speaker confesses how easily he can be unhinged, mastered, by such a fragment. Hofmann is too smart to romanticize this. He does not grant us the consoling myth that love is always a healing force. He shows love as it often is for adults who have learned, early, that safety is conditional: a form of craving, a kind of risk, a hunger that sometimes makes the body mistake pressure for proof.
The book’s central question, asked in different costumes, is not “Who did I love?” It is “What does it mean to be held?” Holding takes many forms here, some beautiful and some brutal, but Hofmann keeps returning to the same physical logic: the body is either contained or it is in danger. The book’s emotional core is literal, boyhood, and terrifyingly plain. In the sequence that includes “Drowning on Crete” and “Arms”, Hofmann gives us the memory from which the rest of the collection seems to radiate: a near drowning at five, a rescue measured not in epiphany but in seconds, the sudden knowledge that death is not theatrical, only quick.
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
I read the Crete poems with a peculiar double vision. I have gone to Crete many times in my life. My family goes often, and my own Greek roots are threaded through the Peloponnese, through Sparta and Kalamata, through that familiar mixture of sun and stone and family insistence: eat, sit, stay, let the day stretch. For me, Crete is not an aesthetic. It is a lived geography, a place that exists in the body before it exists in language. Which is why Hofmann’s “Drowning on Crete” spoke to me with unusual force. His Crete is not the postcard island of clean turquoise and charming tavernas. It is the island where the sea can turn, suddenly, from pleasure to threat. The poem refuses to romanticize the near-death. It lets it stand there, wet-haired and unadorned, as a fact. And for a reader who has returned to the island again and again, who carries family memory in that direction of the world, the poem makes the landscape feel intimate and dangerous at once, as if the familiar coastline has shifted under your feet.
“Arms” extends that memory into a philosophy. Hofmann’s family walks among ruins and headless statues, bodies of men smashed of their heads and privates, and the child notices what is missing: arms. The absence becomes obsession. Then, later, by a pool, the father’s arms become the answer, the living counterpart to broken marble. Hofmann’s image of the father as “an archaeologist in a bathing suit” is funny in its way, but it is also devastatingly accurate. The father is both caretaker and excavator, pulling the child out of water, pulling the child back from becoming an artifact. The poem’s most chilling sentence arrives quietly: the catastrophe would have been total for the father, and it would not have changed a thing in the world. Trauma’s scale is private. History keeps going. The child lives with that knowledge like a second skeleton.
From this point on, the collection’s symbols begin to behave like a system rather than a series of standalone images. Arms are erotic. Arms are violent. Arms are salvation. Water is pleasure. Water is threat. Water is the element that takes without explanation. Hofmann’s discipline is that he does not keep inventing new metaphors to impress us. He returns to the same handful of objects, letting them accrue meaning through repetition. This is why “The Bronze Arms” feels so cohesive. It is not a scrapbook. It is a structure.
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
It is also, quietly and insistently, a queer book in the deepest sense, not merely because it names male desire but because it understands the peculiar emotional weather that can accompany it. As a reader, I have always felt a bond to Hofmann’s work: not because it offers representation in the shallow sense, but because it gets at something truer and harder to say. There is a specific ache in the way queer intimacy can be both ordinary and precarious, both ecstatic and haunted by disappearance. Lovers appear, vanish, remain anonymous, become artifacts in memory before they have even had time to become people in the social world. That vanishing is not only romantic. It is historical. It is cultural. Hofmann writes with the awareness that the room in which desire happens is never fully sealed off from the world that judges it, endangers it, or renders it invisible. Even when the poems do not announce politics, they carry the pressure of it.
The classical references in “The Bronze Arms” are often misunderstood as ornament, a kind of educated atmosphere. They are not. Hofmann uses myth the way some writers use psychology: as a language for compulsion. The Minotaur is not a monster of spectacle here; he is a figure of appetite and enclosure, a body inside a maze, a creature whose identity is made of captivity. The recurring “Maze” poems feel less like architectural sketches than like mental states, the repeated sensation of searching for an exit and finding yourself back where you began. Myth, in Hofmann’s hands, is not escape. It is diagnosis.
The collection’s middle and late poems widen the frame. We move from beds and bodies to cities, museums, ruins. Hofmann’s “Pantheon” is a pivot, a poem in which monumentality and intimacy face each other under a single dome. The Pantheon is permanence made literal, a building designed to outlast individual lives, to make the human scale feel small. Hofmann brings private longing into that public shell, and you can feel the resulting tension. A monument is beautiful, yes. A monument is also indifferent. It remains. You do not. In such a place, desire starts to look like an attempt to carve your initials into stone with a fingernail.
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
This is where “The Bronze Arms” begins to feel uncannily aligned with the present moment, even when it seems to be speaking in a classical register. Our era is full of anxious arguments about what deserves to be preserved and what deserves to be dismantled. Statues are removed, defended, toppled, restored, debated as if they were living beings. Museums are asked to account for the violence embedded in their collections. Cities, meanwhile, are literally reshaped by water, by rising seas, by floods that turn streets into channels. Hofmann isn’t writing polemic, but the book’s obsession with objects that endure and bodies that do not touches the same nerve. The bronzes in his title are beautiful, but beauty is not innocence. Permanence is not the same as life.
In one late poem, Hofmann names contemporary pressure with blunt clarity, linking environmental change with the predatory churn of modern travel. The line lands like a shard of news in a museum gallery. It is almost unpoetic in its directness, which is precisely why it works. Hofmann understands that the modern world has its own mythologies, and they are not subtle. Cities flood. Sacred spaces become backdrops. Elegance becomes denial. The book’s classical atmospherics do not offer escape from the present. They offer a way to measure how thin the protection of history really is.
Yet for all its fascination with permanence, “The Bronze Arms” is finally a book that sides with the temporary. The most enduring image is not bronze. It is touch. A father lifting a child. A lover’s chest. A shared towel, teal with stripes. These are not artifacts a museum can preserve. They are sensations, and their fragility is what makes them holy. Hofmann’s title feels, in this light, almost ironic. It promises hard metal and delivers warm flesh. It gestures toward immortality and insists on mortality. The ache of the book comes from that tension.
If Hofmann has a clear lineage, it is among writers who make antiquity feel like a contemporary city at night. C. P. Cavafy is an obvious ancestor, with his blend of historical consciousness and queer longing, his sense that desire takes place in rooms that are always already ruins. Anne Carson’s “Autobiography of Red” offers another angle on myth repurposed for modern feeling, though Hofmann is more restrained, more committed to the clean sentence and the controlled surface. Ocean Vuong’s “Night Sky with Exit Wounds” echoes faintly in the mingling of family trauma and bodily vulnerability, even if Hofmann’s lyric is cooler, more chiseled, less inclined to lyrical overflow. Mark Doty’s “My Alexandria” sits nearby as well, with its ability to let art objects carry the freight of mortality without tipping into sentimentality.
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
But these comparisons are best used as coordinates, not cages. What makes Hofmann distinct is his blend of austerity and decadence. He luxuriates in surfaces while admitting that surfaces are often a way of managing fear. The clean room. The hard classical ceiling. The dark, Caravaggio-like night. The poems understand that elegance is a kind of defense, a way to arrange the world so it cannot surprise you with catastrophe. And yet catastrophe keeps leaking in anyway, through water, through history, through disappearance.
There are moments when this control risks becoming airless. Hofmann’s lovers are often anonymous, more like presences than characters. That anonymity is thematically apt in a book about vanishing, but it can narrow the social texture. The poems rarely laugh. They rarely give us the ordinary grain of conversation, the awkwardness of daylit life. One sometimes wants the polished surface to crack in a way that is not already designed. Still, the restraint is also the book’s power. Hofmann refuses emotional performance. He refuses the tidy arc of healing. He does not offer closure so much as a weathered acceptance, a lived-in understanding that time keeps moving and the mind keeps returning.
By the time the collection reaches its final stretch, the language has cooled. The erotic heat of the opening poems becomes weather. Night replaces day. Stone replaces skin. The poems begin to feel less like confession and more like aftermath, the quiet inventory of what remains when the body has stopped believing in permanence. Hofmann’s greatest trick is refusing triumph. The ending offers no grand statement, only a clarity that feels earned: we will be wasted by time; the deep sea swallows everything; and still, being held even once can structure a life.
Taken as a whole, “The Bronze Arms” earns a rating of 90/100 – a collection of striking control and strange beauty, whose most lasting monument is not a statue but the human act of lifting someone out of water, and the queer, tender knowledge of how quickly the world can try to make that act disappear.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | February 7th, 2026
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
There is sand in the camera lens in Richie Hofmann’s “The Bronze Arms”, and the sand does what sand has always done: it abrades, it blurs, it refuses the clean outline. The image arrives early, almost offhand, but it reads like a private manifesto. Memory, in this book, will not behave. It will not preserve. It will not keep its edges. Instead, it returns as grit at the border of the frame, as a halo of distortion around the face you most wanted to hold still. Hofmann’s great subject is not simply desire, or myth, or the museum-lit seductions of marble. It is the compromised archive of feeling: how love survives as residue, how the body remembers in textures, how the past becomes an object you carry without ever being able to hold it properly.
Hofmann’s earlier “A Hundred Lovers” announced itself as a catalogue, brisk and erotic, a record of encounters that were both ecstatic and disposable. “The Bronze Arms” keeps the erotic engine but tightens the screws. These poems are more architectural, more haunted by the question of what lasts. The book moves through lust and cities and museums toward an older preoccupation: the urge to turn experience into artifact, and the dread of what happens when artifact replaces life. Hofmann is, at heart, a poet of surfaces who distrusts surface. He likes the hard and classical, the clean room, the cool authority of a beautiful object. He also knows that such authority is often a defense mechanism, the mind’s attempt to arrange the world so it cannot surprise you with catastrophe.
The contents page reads like a map, and like a warning. Titled poems sit beside bracketed fragments that feel like breath marks, or shivers, or the mind’s quick flashes when it cannot bear a full sentence. Asterisks punctuate the sequence like trapdoors. And a set of recurring “Maze” poems returns as if the reader has turned a corner and found the same corridor again, lit slightly differently. Hofmann is not building a linear narrative so much as an interior labyrinth, a system of repetition and rerouting in which desire and fear become indistinguishable. The book begins in heat. It lingers in bedrooms and on sheets and in the blunt choreography of bodies. It then turns, with the inevitability of weather, toward water. And from water it moves into stone, bronze, ruins, the long slow thought of history.
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
The early poems establish Hofmann’s peculiar tonal genius: the way he can be at once intimate and cool, confessional and curatorial. “Breed Me” could have been written as a fevered outpouring. Instead it arrives as inventory. The speaker tracks desire’s strange life cycle with an almost clinical steadiness: pain becomes habit, habit becomes craving, craving becomes boredom. That steadiness is what makes the poem feel dangerous. Hofmann understands something modern culture often forgets: erotic intensity is not the same as emotional safety, and danger can be mistaken for depth. The body learns quickly, sometimes too quickly, what will make it feel briefly invulnerable. The mind spends the rest of life translating that knowledge into something it can live with.
In Hofmann’s world, nearly every erotic moment is shadowed by restraint: wrists, teeth, belts, the body pressed into shape by another body’s will. Even when the poems are tender, their tenderness is edged with precariousness. A lover chews the speaker’s hair softly while he sleeps, and the speaker confesses how easily he can be unhinged, mastered, by such a fragment. Hofmann is too smart to romanticize this. He does not grant us the consoling myth that love is always a healing force. He shows love as it often is for adults who have learned, early, that safety is conditional: a form of craving, a kind of risk, a hunger that sometimes makes the body mistake pressure for proof.
The book’s central question, asked in different costumes, is not “Who did I love?” It is “What does it mean to be held?” Holding takes many forms here, some beautiful and some brutal, but Hofmann keeps returning to the same physical logic: the body is either contained or it is in danger. The book’s emotional core is literal, boyhood, and terrifyingly plain. In the sequence that includes “Drowning on Crete” and “Arms”, Hofmann gives us the memory from which the rest of the collection seems to radiate: a near drowning at five, a rescue measured not in epiphany but in seconds, the sudden knowledge that death is not theatrical, only quick.
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
I read the Crete poems with a peculiar double vision. I have gone to Crete many times in my life. My family goes often, and my own Greek roots are threaded through the Peloponnese, through Sparta and Kalamata, through that familiar mixture of sun and stone and family insistence: eat, sit, stay, let the day stretch. For me, Crete is not an aesthetic. It is a lived geography, a place that exists in the body before it exists in language. Which is why Hofmann’s “Drowning on Crete” spoke to me with unusual force. His Crete is not the postcard island of clean turquoise and charming tavernas. It is the island where the sea can turn, suddenly, from pleasure to threat. The poem refuses to romanticize the near-death. It lets it stand there, wet-haired and unadorned, as a fact. And for a reader who has returned to the island again and again, who carries family memory in that direction of the world, the poem makes the landscape feel intimate and dangerous at once, as if the familiar coastline has shifted under your feet.
“Arms” extends that memory into a philosophy. Hofmann’s family walks among ruins and headless statues, bodies of men smashed of their heads and privates, and the child notices what is missing: arms. The absence becomes obsession. Then, later, by a pool, the father’s arms become the answer, the living counterpart to broken marble. Hofmann’s image of the father as “an archaeologist in a bathing suit” is funny in its way, but it is also devastatingly accurate. The father is both caretaker and excavator, pulling the child out of water, pulling the child back from becoming an artifact. The poem’s most chilling sentence arrives quietly: the catastrophe would have been total for the father, and it would not have changed a thing in the world. Trauma’s scale is private. History keeps going. The child lives with that knowledge like a second skeleton.
From this point on, the collection’s symbols begin to behave like a system rather than a series of standalone images. Arms are erotic. Arms are violent. Arms are salvation. Water is pleasure. Water is threat. Water is the element that takes without explanation. Hofmann’s discipline is that he does not keep inventing new metaphors to impress us. He returns to the same handful of objects, letting them accrue meaning through repetition. This is why “The Bronze Arms” feels so cohesive. It is not a scrapbook. It is a structure.
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
It is also, quietly and insistently, a queer book in the deepest sense, not merely because it names male desire but because it understands the peculiar emotional weather that can accompany it. As a reader, I have always felt a bond to Hofmann’s work: not because it offers representation in the shallow sense, but because it gets at something truer and harder to say. There is a specific ache in the way queer intimacy can be both ordinary and precarious, both ecstatic and haunted by disappearance. Lovers appear, vanish, remain anonymous, become artifacts in memory before they have even had time to become people in the social world. That vanishing is not only romantic. It is historical. It is cultural. Hofmann writes with the awareness that the room in which desire happens is never fully sealed off from the world that judges it, endangers it, or renders it invisible. Even when the poems do not announce politics, they carry the pressure of it.
The classical references in “The Bronze Arms” are often misunderstood as ornament, a kind of educated atmosphere. They are not. Hofmann uses myth the way some writers use psychology: as a language for compulsion. The Minotaur is not a monster of spectacle here; he is a figure of appetite and enclosure, a body inside a maze, a creature whose identity is made of captivity. The recurring “Maze” poems feel less like architectural sketches than like mental states, the repeated sensation of searching for an exit and finding yourself back where you began. Myth, in Hofmann’s hands, is not escape. It is diagnosis.
The collection’s middle and late poems widen the frame. We move from beds and bodies to cities, museums, ruins. Hofmann’s “Pantheon” is a pivot, a poem in which monumentality and intimacy face each other under a single dome. The Pantheon is permanence made literal, a building designed to outlast individual lives, to make the human scale feel small. Hofmann brings private longing into that public shell, and you can feel the resulting tension. A monument is beautiful, yes. A monument is also indifferent. It remains. You do not. In such a place, desire starts to look like an attempt to carve your initials into stone with a fingernail.
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
This is where “The Bronze Arms” begins to feel uncannily aligned with the present moment, even when it seems to be speaking in a classical register. Our era is full of anxious arguments about what deserves to be preserved and what deserves to be dismantled. Statues are removed, defended, toppled, restored, debated as if they were living beings. Museums are asked to account for the violence embedded in their collections. Cities, meanwhile, are literally reshaped by water, by rising seas, by floods that turn streets into channels. Hofmann isn’t writing polemic, but the book’s obsession with objects that endure and bodies that do not touches the same nerve. The bronzes in his title are beautiful, but beauty is not innocence. Permanence is not the same as life.
In one late poem, Hofmann names contemporary pressure with blunt clarity, linking environmental change with the predatory churn of modern travel. The line lands like a shard of news in a museum gallery. It is almost unpoetic in its directness, which is precisely why it works. Hofmann understands that the modern world has its own mythologies, and they are not subtle. Cities flood. Sacred spaces become backdrops. Elegance becomes denial. The book’s classical atmospherics do not offer escape from the present. They offer a way to measure how thin the protection of history really is.
Yet for all its fascination with permanence, “The Bronze Arms” is finally a book that sides with the temporary. The most enduring image is not bronze. It is touch. A father lifting a child. A lover’s chest. A shared towel, teal with stripes. These are not artifacts a museum can preserve. They are sensations, and their fragility is what makes them holy. Hofmann’s title feels, in this light, almost ironic. It promises hard metal and delivers warm flesh. It gestures toward immortality and insists on mortality. The ache of the book comes from that tension.
If Hofmann has a clear lineage, it is among writers who make antiquity feel like a contemporary city at night. C. P. Cavafy is an obvious ancestor, with his blend of historical consciousness and queer longing, his sense that desire takes place in rooms that are always already ruins. Anne Carson’s “Autobiography of Red” offers another angle on myth repurposed for modern feeling, though Hofmann is more restrained, more committed to the clean sentence and the controlled surface. Ocean Vuong’s “Night Sky with Exit Wounds” echoes faintly in the mingling of family trauma and bodily vulnerability, even if Hofmann’s lyric is cooler, more chiseled, less inclined to lyrical overflow. Mark Doty’s “My Alexandria” sits nearby as well, with its ability to let art objects carry the freight of mortality without tipping into sentimentality.
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
But these comparisons are best used as coordinates, not cages. What makes Hofmann distinct is his blend of austerity and decadence. He luxuriates in surfaces while admitting that surfaces are often a way of managing fear. The clean room. The hard classical ceiling. The dark, Caravaggio-like night. The poems understand that elegance is a kind of defense, a way to arrange the world so it cannot surprise you with catastrophe. And yet catastrophe keeps leaking in anyway, through water, through history, through disappearance.
There are moments when this control risks becoming airless. Hofmann’s lovers are often anonymous, more like presences than characters. That anonymity is thematically apt in a book about vanishing, but it can narrow the social texture. The poems rarely laugh. They rarely give us the ordinary grain of conversation, the awkwardness of daylit life. One sometimes wants the polished surface to crack in a way that is not already designed. Still, the restraint is also the book’s power. Hofmann refuses emotional performance. He refuses the tidy arc of healing. He does not offer closure so much as a weathered acceptance, a lived-in understanding that time keeps moving and the mind keeps returning.
By the time the collection reaches its final stretch, the language has cooled. The erotic heat of the opening poems becomes weather. Night replaces day. Stone replaces skin. The poems begin to feel less like confession and more like aftermath, the quiet inventory of what remains when the body has stopped believing in permanence. Hofmann’s greatest trick is refusing triumph. The ending offers no grand statement, only a clarity that feels earned: we will be wasted by time; the deep sea swallows everything; and still, being held even once can structure a life.
Taken as a whole, “The Bronze Arms” earns a rating of 90/100 – a collection of striking control and strange beauty, whose most lasting monument is not a statue but the human act of lifting someone out of water, and the queer, tender knowledge of how quickly the world can try to make that act disappear.
January 27, 2026
Thank you so very much to Knopf for sending me a copy of this poetry collection!
OUT FEBRUARY 10 2026
This collection feels like a summer holiday, abroad, and like youth — full of love, lust and heartbreak. But equally, there is a sense of the timeless, no… the ancient. Each poem is in communication with myth, landscape, lovers and drowning in memory and metaphor. Another wonderful set from a favorite poet.
OUT FEBRUARY 10 2026
This collection feels like a summer holiday, abroad, and like youth — full of love, lust and heartbreak. But equally, there is a sense of the timeless, no… the ancient. Each poem is in communication with myth, landscape, lovers and drowning in memory and metaphor. Another wonderful set from a favorite poet.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Beautifully written. Love poems from the heart offering little snippets of freedom in life, death, and in the water.
Told by a gay man. Oh, to be free to be oneself while navigating life after a near escape from drowning as a child. These are the stories that defined moments & memories.
Beautiful.
Told by a gay man. Oh, to be free to be oneself while navigating life after a near escape from drowning as a child. These are the stories that defined moments & memories.
Beautiful.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews