Losses of Life is comprised of two long poems: The first, Child of Man, derived from Emerson's journals, letters, and essays, is an elegy for the death of Emerson's son Waldo. The second, Stations, is a sequence of poems exploring losses of a different sort. Eric Hoffman's "sharp-eyed and agile" poems are "teeming with surprise" (Patrick Pritchett) and "deserve to be better and more widely-known" (Eileen Tabios). "The quality of the verse… is undeniable; there are great pleasures to be had in Hoffman's lines" (Jason Ranek). His poetry manifests a "restless and manifold creativity, a creativity Emerson himself would have saluted" (Anthony Rudolf).