Read the winning piece of our 2025 Nonfiction Contest “Through the Mirror” by Jessie Cato selected by Lucy Ives.

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Nov/Dec 2021 • Vol. XLIII No. 6 |

Things That Are Rare

It is so easy to imagine your absence.
Maybe it is night, we are still handsome.
All the young are.
It is so easy. Another thing to be beautiful.
How gently the curtain falls back down
and the room is dark again, the season
of in-betweenities,
my eyes heavy, my lips numb.
Fingerprints on the unjacketed books.
Inside the collars
of the shirts in the open closet—
An affluent night.
You’ve touched everything in my small room.

 

Read another poem by Richie Hofmann by purchasing a print or digital copy of the Nov/Dec 2021 issue here.

Richie Hofmann is the author of two books of poems, A Hundred Lovers (Alfred A. Knopf, 2022) and Second Empire (Alice James Books, 2015). His poetry has appeared most recently in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Yale Review, and he has been honored with the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship and the Wallace Stegner Fellowship.

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Introduction

By Richie Hofmann

What are the young poets thinking and writing about? In reading this year’s brilliant submissions for the Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize, awarded to the very best writing by poets in […]

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