A Hundred Lovers

A gay man's erotic journal in poems, from a young and rising star in the poetry scene, author of the highly acclaimed debut collection Second Empire. A Hundred Lovers is a catalogue of encounters, sublime, steamy, and frank. Inspired by French autofiction, the poems feel both sharp and diaristic; their lyrical, intimate world brings us everyday scenes imbued with sex. Eros enters, where shame had lived," he observes, as the poems explore risk and appetite, promiscuity and violence, and, in the wake of his marriage, monogamy. Bringing us both the carefully knotted silk ties of the wedding pair and their undress in a series of Hockney-like interiors where passion colors every object, every detail, Richie speaks plainly of the saliva, tears, and guts of the carnal, just as he does of the sublime in works of art. A Hundred Lovers invites us to consider our own memories of pleasure and pain, which fill the generous white space the poet leaves open to us between his ravishing lines"--