AUTHOR'S NOTE:

This poem responds to J. M. W. Turner’s haunting painting, Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On. First exhibited in 1840, the painting now hangs in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where I would return to it again and again as a student.

BIO:

Richie Hofmann’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Antioch Review, The New Criterion, Southwest Review, Literary Imagination, Linebreak, and other journals, and has been honored with the Academy of American Poets Prize and the AWP Intro Journal Award.