LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • Following his captivating and popular A Hundred Lovers, Hofmann’s new collection is a queer coming-of-age, tinged with myth: poems that bring us into a fever dream of antiquity and desire at its limits

Recognizing 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 he 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 survival: “Masculine arms lifted me. / Masculine arms held me while I slept.” The poems navigate 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 reclaimed: at the dark center, in the heart of the past.

A triumphant follow-up to the fetching catalog of lovers in Hofmann’s last book, this collection thrills with its archaeology of self, its notes of austerity and decadence.