REFLECTIONS ON LARB RICHIE HOFMANN
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s a poet and a critic, I am immensely grateful to the editors of the Los Angeles Review of Books for supporting my writing and for giving me the opportunity to write on new books of poetry that matter to me. I was especially delighted to share my passion for the poetry of James Merrill with readers occasioned by the publication of Stephen Yenser’s well-executed edition of The Book of Ephraim (Knopf, 2018). And to praise Jericho Brown’s deft handling of love and violence in his unforgettable collection, The Tradition (Copper Canyon, 2019), which went on to win the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The poem reprinted here, “The Mind of Art,” is from a sequence of dramatic monologues called “The Prince,” in the voice of an imagined 18th-century exiled courtesan, based loosely on the Comtesse de Soissons, in which she meditates on art, sex, letter writing, motherhood, murder, fashion, and abandonment. Mostly, I interact with LARB as a reader, hungry for sophisticated, complex, enjoyable book reviewing in a landscape where fewer and fewer publications make space for serious and rigorous critique. I look forward to the next 10 years of insightful criticism and memorable creative writing. I am truly honored to be a part of this magazine’s history.
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