A HUNDRED LOVERS, POEMS by Richie Hofmann
Alfred A. Knopf, $29, 2022
Let me count the hundred ways I love A Hundred Lovers. Hofmann’s poetry with its rare beauty and lucidity is personal and universal. Reading the collection feels like looking into the clearest bluest lake that belies its depth and all the sparkly or sharp objects at the bottom. The poems are very much about Hofmann’s loves of the past, present, and even future as he writes about his forthcoming nuptials in “Spring Wedding”: The day before we married, we napped / in the afternoon, with no sheets over us, / and felt the breeze from the lake…
There’s a sophisticated simplicity to the poems that arises from real elegance, and, of course, Hofmann’s telluric mastery. The writing makes one smile with a frisson of recognition. An indefinable, almost ancien régime indulgence in pleasure and sensuality backdrops, as Hofmann’s travels take him abroad. In “History of Pleasure” he writes: I walked by myself to the market / past ruins with broken / bodies of stone where even / a fragment of a man could undo me.
Young love, the kind that makes the rest of the world disappear, appears in the poem “French Lover” (also published in The New Yorker) and recalls undergrad days when a student emails his professor to say he’s sick and will miss French Novel class, when, indeed, he’s perfectly well and enraptured by his second lover: Of course / we’d have other lovers. / Snow fell in our hair. / You were my second lover.
We believe in Hoffman’s declarations when we read “Feast Days”: Later when we’re tired of walking, let’s stop in front / of some beautiful place and tell each other what we want.
What I want, Richie, is to read your next volume of poetry and then the ones to come.
– Helen Mitsios
WHICH WAY IS NORTH A Creative Compass for Makers, Marketers and Mystics by Will Cady
Matt Holt Books, $28
One of the great things about this book is it’s not really about Reddit, but about a holistic philosophy of media, humanity in the shape-shifting way it reacts to media, the creative process and unlocking creativity, and business strategy and leadership (and not the bullshit white board with quadrants stuff). The book is mystical and belongs as much on the spirituality shelf as the business one. Most of all, and most surprising, it’s beautifully written. It’s poetic. He makes you think and he tells great stories like industrial parables.
Among business books it’s a Unicorn. AI may eventually eat us all, but it won’t get folks like Will Cady til last.
– Bob Guccione, Jr.
MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios by Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales and Gavin Edwards
Liveright, $35
After reading MCU, you might think that Marvel is a tragic (super)hero. They’ve had so many owners and partners who only cared about making toys on top of selling the rights to so many characters. (I still need a PhD to understand who truly owns Spider-Man.) But by Odin’s beard, we all needed Kevin Feige and Disney to right the sinking ship. With great power came great responsibility, and the brain trust acknowledged they’ve been irresponsible making too many films with not enough oversight over the past few years.
MCU is also a great book for anyone who wants to learn how the machine called Hollywood works – and doesn’t – especially when it comes to who gets credit for writing a screenplay, how many years an idea for a movie takes to develop, the stress people in post-production are under and why you should never ask Samuel L. Jackson to run. If you do, you will feel the fury…
With the recent writers and actors strike and the revelation the House of Mouse had about the quality of Marvel’s work, there’s really only one direction to go in: Excelsior!
- – Jason Stahl