Losses of Life
Eric Hoffman
ISBN 978-1-947980-11-2 74 pages $15.00
Losses of Life is comprised of two long poems:
The first, Child of Man, derived from Emerson’s journals, letters, and essays, is an elegy for the death of Emerson’s son Waldo.
The second, Stations, is a sequence of poems exploring losses of a different sort.
Eric Hoffman’s “sharp-eyed and agile” poems are “teeming with surprise”
(Patrick Pritchett)
and
“deserve to be better and more widely-known” (Eileen Tabios).
“The quality of the verse… is undeniable; there are great pleasures to be had in Hoffman’s lines” (Jason Ranek).
His poetry manifests a “restless and manifold creativity, a creativity Emerson himself would have saluted”
(Anthony Rudolf).
Eric Hoffman is the author of several collections of poetry, including The Transparent Eye (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016), and Forms of Life (2015), By the Hours (2013), and The American Eye (2011), published by Dos Madres Press. He is the author of Oppen: A Narrative, a biography of poet George Oppen (Spuyten Duyvil, 2018), editor of Cerebus the Barbarian Messiah: Essays on the Epic Graphic Satire of Dave Sim and Gerhard (McFarland, 2012), co-editor (with Dominick Grace) of Approaching Twin Peaks: Essays on the Original Series (McFarland, 2017), Dave Sim: Conversations (2013), Chester Brown: Conversations (2013), and Seth: Conversations (2015), with Grace and Jason Sacks of Jim Shooter: Conversations (2017), and with Nina Goss of Tearing the World Apart: Bob Dylan and the 21st Century (2017), all published by the University Press of Mississippi. He lives in Connecticut with his wife Robin and son Sailor.