Straightforward and precise, these poems, almost exclusively in narrative form, beckon the reader with their immediacy. Gracefully confirming the inextricable links between self and family, Hirsch, winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award for Wild Gratitude , is, at his best, captivating, transforming tremendous respect for and fascination with his Eastern European roots and Chicago upbringing into enlightened, richly detailed verse that artfully side-steps sentimentality.
Edward Hirsch is the author of seven previous collections of poetry, including Wild Gratitude, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and SpecialOrders. He has also published four prose books, among them How to Read a Poem, a national best seller. He has received numerous awards for his poetry, including a MacArthur Fellowship, and publishes regularly in a wide variety of magazines and journals, including American Poetry Review and The New Yorker. A longtime teacher in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston, he is now the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Edward Hirsch is represented by Random House Speakers Bureau (www.rhspeakers.com).