I'm pleased to announce the release of Pain Is a Chain. Move, and I'll Hear You from Aqueduct Press as volume 101 in the Conversation Pieces series. This work of dark poetry is now available in both print and e-book editions at www.aqueductpress.com.
You can read a sample from the book here: https://www.aqueductpress.com/books/samples/978-1-61976-290-9.pdf
I stand in a place where sin fell. Where typed-up humanity got rewritten. A machete-draft you only read once. Because paper ideology doesn't protect anyone.
I won’t tell you my name but it ended with—WAR. I always had a conflict in me. Maybe that’s why they picked me. I was a shape-shifter. Not the kind you think. Morals shift in all of us. They change when money hits your palm.
Some were too smart for blood. We used words to shake them up. Then break them. Like a piggy bank. Death became a business partner. The world’s biggest capitalist. There’s a killing to be made.
But there is something in me that even death is afraid of.
Pain Is a Chain. Move, and I’ll Hear You is a lyrical exploration of ghost autopsy.
Advance Praise
“Odd. Dark. Disturbing. Hofstatter’s Pain Is a Chain. Move, and
I’ll Hear You bleeds and haunts quickly. Once you’re in it, you’re
in it to the dastardly end.”
—Christina M. Rau, author of the Elgin Award-winning Liberating the Astronauts
“Hofstatter is a prose poet of brutality and elegance. He explores
the darkest depths of what we’re capable of without flinching.”
—Priya Sharma, author of Ormeshadow, winner of the Shirley Jackson Award
“Hofstatter confidently steps onto the field, hands twitching and
full of wires and grue. Not since I encountered Thom Metzger’s This
Is Your Final Warning have I been so enraptured by the stitching
of words and image story. This, my friends, is absolutely
astounding!!”
—John Boden, author of Thrift Store
Puzzles and Etiquette of Booby Traps
Reviews
"There’s a dream world aspect to his poetry that draws to mind the
increasingly wide-eyed, deranged Captain Willard in Apocalypse Now as
the mundane and the fantastical, the atavistic rising through the
tools of modernity, the violently deranged and the softly sensual
blurs into a hair-trigger flickering of flashed moments....There is no
natural justice beyond what Hofstatter characterises as the chains
tying those who killed to those they killed for the rest of their term
on Earth." (Read the whole review)
—Exquisite Terror, Nick Soulsby, July 14, 2026