Each Child a Disappearance

Each Child a Disappearance gathers work from more than fifty years of Richard Hoffman's powerful lyrics and elegies, reckonings and acts of witness. Rooted in family loss and expanding outward to histories of violence and injustice, these poems join lyric precision to moral imagination, asking what we owe the dead, the living, and the future. Hoffman's poems grieve and remember, insisting on the dignity of witness-on remembering as an ethical act, and on language as a fragile but necessary opposition to erasure. Including searing meditations on war, state violence, ecological ruin, and historical betrayal, these poems arise from a life lived with unflinching attention to what wounds and what endures.