An acclaimed poet and our greatest champion for poetry offers an inspiring and insightful new reading of the American tradition

We live in unsettled times. What is America and who are we as a people? How do we understand the dreams and betrayals that have shaped the American experience? For poet and critic Edward Hirsch, poetry opens up new ways of answering these questions, of reconnecting with one another and with what’s best in us.

In this landmark new book from Library of America, Hirsch offers deeply personal readings of forty essential American poems we thought we knew—from Anne Bradstreet’s “The Author to Her Book” and Phillis Wheatley’s “To S.M. a Young African Painter, on seeing his Works” to Garrett Hongo’s “Ancestral Graves, Kahuku” and Joy Harjo’s “Rabbit Is Up to Tricks”—exploring how these poems have sustained his own life and how they might uplift our diverse but divided nation.

“This is a personal book about American poetry,” writes Hirsch, “but I hope it is more than a personal selection. I have chosen forty poems from our extensive archive and songbook that have been meaningful to me, part of my affective life, my critical consideration, but I have also tried to be cognizant of the changing playbook in American poetry, which is not fixed but fluctuating, ever in flow, to pay attention to the wider consideration, the appreciable reach of our literature. This is a book of encounters and realizations.”

Reviews/Interviews

PRAISE FOR EDWARD HIRSCH

“An eminent cultural figure finds a funny way to tell his life story. Hirsch, a poet, a bestselling author, and the president of the Guggenheim Foundation for more than two decades, channels the voices and personalities of his Chicagoland Jewish childhood to create a memoir composed of jokes and short vignettes, one setup-and-punchline after another—probably surprising himself as much as the reader when the gimmick holds up for nearly 300 pages, until the author leaves home for college at Grinnell, where an angry high school French teacher lobbied madly to prevent his admission because of a profane question he posed about Santa Claus at a senior assembly. Though he’s toned it down a bit since the days of using the f-word in high school, in essence, he’s still that guy: sometimes silly, sometimes off-color, often Yiddish-flavored, with a penchant for puns and dad jokes that never quits. Here is an entry titled “Brain Sale”: “‘If we sold everyone’s brains,’ my grandmother said to me, ‘I’d charge the most for yours.’ ‘Why, because I’m the smartest one in the family?’ ‘No, because yours have never been used.’” Another entry is “Celebratory Dinner”: “Whenever I got laryngitis, my mom served steak to celebrate the fact that I couldn’t talk. That was tough to swallow.” A wonderful section recounting the fate of a series of aquatic pets is titled “The Goldfish Variations.” All the jokes don’t stop him from filling in along the way the details of his quirky mother, his two fathers, his siblings, and his extended Jewish family, his sports achievements and romantic conquests, and the Jewish migration to the suburbs. Particularly telling is one of the final sections, “How To Remember Childhood”: “This book is dedicated to my sister Lenie. We lived through everything together. We share a sense of humor and a history. She has vetted my stories, but she also remembers our childhood as traumatic. I prefer to recall it otherwise. Her way was more expensive. It required psychoanalysis.” A unique recreation of a great life in a largely vanished world. Bada Bing, Bada boom!”

—Kirkus

Renowned poet Hirsch recounts his rough-and-tumble Chicago and Skokie childhood in ingeniously distilled comedic bits. Some are as concise as a sentence; others set a scene and include dialogue, usually in the form of insults or threats. Pithy, lacerating, bittersweet, and hilarious, these quick takes often focus on Irma, Hirsch’s determined mother, and his gambler birth father, called Ruby, who left the family when Hirsch and his sister Lenie were very young. Irma eventually remarried, and Kurt became their steadfast father, while their obstreperous family circle included a bunch of Irma’s friends she insisted they embrace as aunts and uncles: “The women were loud, the men shady.” “No one had a job—everyone had a hustle.” Hirsch sets his extended family’s combative temperaments, sharp-witted battles, and scrappy struggles within the history of 1950s and ’60s Jewish life in Chicago and its suburb Skokie. Here too is the future poet’s coming-of-age as a multitalented high-school athlete, which secured his crucial college scholarship, while he was also drawn to literature: “Reading poetry, I felt poetry reading me.” Wisecracks, mischief, trouble, arguments, cruelties, absurdities, and deceit are all delivered with a stand-up comic’s precision and a poet’s gift for exhilarating and droll wordplay. This card-slapping, dice-rolling, nimbly riffing, heart-wrenching remembrance is glorious in its pain and love, humor, and wonder.

— Donna Seaman

“Edward Hirsch is the most endearing of guides to the ecstasies of reading poetry.”

—Susan Sontag

HOW TO READ A POEM

“In a book of compelling, engaging prose, one of our country’s most distinguished poets connects us knowingly to his craft—helps us to appreciate the magic of language as it grows within us, and shapes our way of seeing and hearing others and our understanding of the world.” 

—Robert Coles

“If you are pretty sure you don’t like poetry, this is the book that is bound to change your mind. Hirsch demonstrates to one and all that the reading of poems is one of the supreme pleasures in life.”   

—Charles Simic

“The answer Hirsch gives to the question of how to read a poem is: Ecstatically.” 

—Boston Book Review

100 POEMS TO BREAK YOUR HEART

“Possibly there is no living guide to poetry more deft and caring than Edward Hirsch. . . . He’s not only an anthologist, but also the most insightful interpreter of why some poems come to mean so much to so many people: how they penetrate the crush of babble around us and change us forever. . . . This is a book to keep at bedside, to open when feeling low, to share with those who find poetry mysterious or difficult. It’s engaging, healing, and rich in every way.”  

—Naomi Shihab Nye

Poetry Matters. Two new books remind us why.