Playing Dead in the Humiliations of Love: On Richie Hoffman’s The Bronze Arms

by william o’neal ii

In Richie Hoffman’s newest poetry collection, The Bronze Arms, love is something powerful, something that takes, something that leaves the poet’s body degraded & buried beneath the sands of time. I say, “the body,” because Hoffman’s mind is sharp, & does not struggle to remember the desires of his past. 

Hoffman directly associates himself with the speaker of these poems, drawing from personal history & a near death experience where, as a boy, he nearly drowned in a swimming pool on Crete. The collection opens with the poet remembering a voice: 

Love is a memory now, you said.

The deeply queer love in this collection is something impermanent, transient, moving. None of the other men in these memory-poems have faces, they have only “(fingers, teeth)” & voices. The lover is “a faceless / presence.” While Hoffman’s 2022 book, A Hundred Lovers, lives in love’s sensuality—the soft winged realm—The Bronze Arms shows a strong hand, the kinks & ruins of love’s force, still, without shame.

In the poem, “Men’s Beds,” Hoffman writes:

I slept in men’s beds:
They took turns breaking
Me. It felt good, but one’s absence 
Weighed on me like a death.

The majority of this work lives inside desire’s wound. The masculine arms that break him in one poem, save his life in another. Recounting the time as a boy when he was saved moments before drowning, he remembers himself, “Drawn from the water / by his father’s arms.” I will stop short of calling this observation Freudian, but the poems do recount a history of queerness— a poetic bildungsroman of the poet’s desire, sorting through waves of tenderness & violence. 

Hoffman views Desire as grand as the world: The rain punishes, the sea is a man’s body for the drinking, dolphins fall in love. The natural world reflects back to the poet his own passion for life, his propensity towards loneliness:

the night entering the day from behind
I took off my clothes
my body a series of entrances & exits 
desire   desire without any meaning. 

The poems are full of visuals & references to neoclassicism & the Greco-Roman myths. Diana washing her armpits, Callisto pregnant, Europa taken. These stories are used as backdrop to heighten the poet’s memory of loss into a type of myth, a museum with high ceilings & marble bodies on the walls. The conjuring of these stories not only recount a mythic violence but also a history of queer erotism long-present in the old stories of both the Greeks & Romans. The gods, Hoffman writes, “are slaves to passion.” The poems are a vessel for Hoffman to hold, again, the passionate spirits of queer ancestors, adding himself to the mythical lineage.

The poems structures are tight, carefully chiseled. Most of them containing one line stanzas building on top of the other, standing tall down the page. Intermittently, there are short quatrains & cinquains hidden in the corners of blank pages that all begin with lowercase letters as if they have been broken off from other poems. The form in this way mimics the recovered verses of Sappho’s fragments & perhaps the excavated arm of an old 18th century boy carved from marble. The reader is discovering parts of the memory along with Hoffman. In this way the book holds measures of heavy silence, allowing for the European landscape to color the poems with the sounds of piss, rain, trains, & the sea.

Hoffman is an American poet by way of German descent, but most of his poems, detailing memories of love & sensuality always take place against a landscape away from America. It’s always Venice, Rome, Vilnius, Kep, Berlin, Frankfurt, Stuttgart. Hoffman is drawn towards beautiful things, the encompassing language of Eros, & small material pleasures (old flowers, bronze, coffee). In a world where language blurs even violence with pleasure & beauty:

my flesh kisses the glove of leather
the chain
the bed
the tether

Then, it is important to pay attention to what is labeled “ugly.” The word “ugly” is used four times throughout the collection to describe Philip II’s wife, the poet’s bloody sandals, “any language shouted at you militaristically,” & “America.” 

This book inhabits an aesthetic of richness that only exists in old things, a wealth of history. There is a lack of honest depravity in the language of these poems, everything shines with a faint glow. Even when piss ruins a surface it is “opaline,” the unclean pigeons are still “angels.” There is a point to all this, I would argue, that love, the bronze that coats the body, even when “melted down,” only becomes something more powerful like weapons, like money. Nothing is ever created, nothing ever destroyed. Beauty, when boiled down transforms into power, into an aesthetic of depravity— & nothing too young can be beautiful: Phillip II’s wife, new sandals, America. 

It is hard to read The Bronze Arms & not think of the poetic traditions of C.P. Cavafy, Louise Glück, Sappho, or even the erotic writings in the Song of Songs— poets that use the natural world as a reflection of one’s own passion. 

In an interview with The Adroit Journal, Hoffman confesses that the self-myth of his almost drowning is indeed a myth. He cannot remember whether it actually happened, but he can’t separate that partial memory from his own history. I am thinking of an essay E.M. Forster wrote about C.P Cavafy’s poetry where he observes, quite bluntly, “They [Cavafy’s poems] reveal a beautiful & curious world. It comes into being through the world of experience, but it is not experience, for the poet is even more incapable than most people of seeing straight.”

Poetry is not a medium of seeing straight, not even to Hoffman. Poetry is a medium of memory holding & myth making. Hoffman knows that the physical body is the only vessel that can truly hold a memory with longevity. In that case, the poems are a type of body carved as a way to hold pieces of the past. Like Cavafy, Richie Hoffman is not concerned with seeing straight, he is concerned with not allowing the shame of loss to ruin carnal pleasures nor love. Looking back on his life he writes:

        In my short life I’ve fallen in love, but that’s mostly it. 
Taken in the dark 
And humiliated 
By the deep sea

I read this collection for the first time in one sitting, after a year of immense loss, sitting on Rue Jean du Bellay across from the Seine. Night had fallen down towards me & I was alone, except for the occasional man on a bicycle, the occasional waiter stepping out for a smoke. These poems in The Bronze Arms impressed upon me a profound loneliness that only comes from having experienced the humiliating deep joys of love. The pleasure of having been marked by time, “playing dead” in the ruins of your own making, waiting to be found again. I stared for a while at the dark river trying to remember the phrases of the collection that stood out to me the most. I heard only the voice:

I want to remember everything that didn’t happen.

But isn’t that just the definition of memory? 

Richie Hoffman’s The Bronze Arms was published on February 10th, 2026 by Alfred A. Knopf.