About this item
From the award-winning poet, dark comic microbursts of prose deliver a whole childhood, at the hands of an aspiring middle-class Jewish family whose hard-boiled American values and wit were the forge of a poet's coming-of-age."My grandparents taught me to write my sins on paper and cast them into the water. . . . They didn't expect an entire book," Hirsch says in the "prologue" to this glorious festival of knife-sharp observations. In microchapters - sometimes only a single scathing sentence long - with titles like "Call to Breakfast," "Pay Cash," "The Sorrow of Manly Sports," and "Aristotle on Lawrence Avenue," Eddie's gambling father, Ruby, son of a white metal smelter, schools him and his sister in blackjack; Eddie's mom bangs pots to wake the kids to a breakfast of cold cereal; Uncle Bob, in the collection business, is heard threatening people on the phone; and nobody suffers fools.
About the Author
Edward Hirsch is a celebrated poet and peerless advocate for poetry. He was born in Chicago in 1950 - his accent makes it impossible for him to hide his origins - and educated at Grinnell College and the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a Ph. D. in Folklore. His devotion to poetry is lifelong. He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a Pablo Neruda Presidential Medal of Honor, the Prix de Rome, and an Academy of Arts and Letters Award. In 2008, he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. bio-imgEdward Hirsch's first collection of poems, For the Sleepwalkers (1981) , received the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University and the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets. His second collection, Wild Gratitude (1986) , won the National Book Critics Award. Since then, he has published six additional books of poems: The Night Parade (1989) , Earthly Measures (1994) ,On Love (1998) , Lay Back the Darkness (2003) , Special Orders (2008) , and The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems (2010) , which brings together thirty-five years of poems. Hirsch is also the author of five prose books, including A Poet's Glossary (2014) , the result of decades of passionate study, Poet's Choice (2006) , which consists of his popular columns from the Washington Post Book World, and How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999) , a national bestseller. He is the editor of Theodore Roethke's Selected Poems (2005) and co-editor of The Making of a Sonnet: A Norton Anthology (2008) . He also edits the series "The Writer's World" (Trinity University Press) .Edward Hirsch taught for six years in the English Department at Wayne State University and seventeen years in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston. He is now president of theJohn Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
