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 an iron 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. In this household, Eddie learned to jab with his left and cross with his right, never to kid a kidder, and how to sneak out at night.

Affectionate, deadpan, and exuberant, steeped in Yiddishkeit and Midwestern practicality, Hirsch’s laugh-and-cry performance animates a heartbreaking odyssey, from the cradle to the day he leaves home, armed with sorrow and a huge store of poetic wit.

Reviews/Interviews

PRAISE FOR EDWARD HIRSCH

“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.

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