The Blog

Giving Tradition a Facelift: An Exploration of Richie Hofmann’s SECOND EMPIRE

Peter LaBerge

“Standing at the water’s edge, I watch myself / loosen into a brief, exquisite blur.” Though we begin our journey through Richie Hofmann’s stunning debut poetry collection Second Empire with the freedom to move and self-express, it is a destination of sorts for Hofmann himself. The collection functions as a deeply personal glimpse into the immediate and long-term effects of the tension Hofmann experienced growing up as a queer man in Western society: tension between security and connection, beauty and fragility, tradition and identity. The collection as a whole is far from sole introspection, however.

Human Rights Index #44: World Sports

TIR staff

The Human Rights Index is prepared three times a year by the University of Iowa Center for Human Rights. The Iowa Review is proud to feature the Index on our website, to suggest the global political and socioeconomic context within which we read and write.

Human Rights Index #44

Prepared by The University of Iowa Center for Human Rights (UICHR)*

Geoffrey O'Brien's IN A MIST

John Tamplin

Geoffrey O'Brien's poems are full of things vanishing. The first three poems in his new book, In a Mist, appear to be elegies for vanished people. "For S." concludes:

A wisp is too harsh.
At mere hint of sight
all parts of you
drop into the glare.

"A Yard at Daybreak" ends:

The shop is shuttered
and the yard so quiet
you can hear the noise
of shadows vanishing.

Mark Bibbins's THEY DON'T KILL YOU BECAUSE THEY'RE HUNGRY, THEY KILL YOU BECAUSE THEY'RE FULL

Adam Day

One of the most engaging poems in Mark Bibbins’s smart and enjoyable third book of poetry, They Don’t Kill You Because They’re Hungry, They Kill You Because They’re Full, is “Pat Robertson Transubstantiation Engine No.1,” the first of a series of six such poems, and which opens with these lines: “First I was fellating an African despot / for his diamonds, next I was paying / a hooker to give me back / my teeth.” When first encountering lines like these, you can’t necessarily be blamed for wondering who still cares about irony and “soft surrealism” (a phenomenon in which strange events occur that seem to invoke surrealism or the absurd, but with little to no substantive socio-political or ontological substance), particularly given the overabundance and the poor h

Free, full-text online archive!

TIR staff

We're delighted to announce the launch of our free digital archive, ir.uiowa.edu/iowareview, which contains the full text of virtually all the writing published in The Iowa Review from its founding in 1970 through 2011. The archive comprises 130 issues of the magazine and 5,752 individual poems, essays, and stories, searchable by volume, author name, and title. The site also includes links to the most frequently downloaded pieces, as well as a world map displaying real-time readership.

Issues from the most recent three years continue to remain accessible only to subscribers, bookstore patrons, and those who order copies through our website. Excerpts of work from the current and recent issues appear at iowareview.org/content/issues.