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Book Cover for: The Discarded Life, Adam Kirsch

The Discarded Life

Adam Kirsch

In these moving and meditative poems, Adam Kirsch shows how the experiences and recognitions of early life continue to shape us into adulthood. Richly evoking a 1980s childhood in Los Angeles, Kirsch uses Gen X landmarks--from Devo to Atari to the Challenger disaster--to tell a story of emotional and artistic coming of age, exploring universal questions of meaning, mortality, and how we become who we are.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Red Hen Press
  • Publish Date: May 31st, 2022
  • Pages: 56
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.74in - 5.83in - 0.39in - 0.25lb
  • EAN: 9781636280158
  • Categories: American - GeneralSubjects & Themes - Places

About the Author

Kirsch, Adam: -

Adam Kirsch is a poet and critic whose writing appears regularly in The New Yorker and other publications. He is the author of three previous collections of poetry and several books of criticism and biography, and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship. An editor at the Wall Street Journal, he has taught at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College. He was born in Los Angeles and now lives in New York City.

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Book Cover for: The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry, Adam Kirsch
Book Cover for: Jacob El Hanani: Recent Works on Canvas, Adam Kirsch
Book Cover for: The Global Novel: Writing the World in the 21st Century, Adam Kirsch
Book Cover for: Come and Hear: What I Saw in My Seven-And-A-Half-Year Journey Through the Talmud, Adam Kirsch
Book Cover for: Liberties Journal of Culture and Politics: Volume 4, Issue 2, Carissa Veliz
Book Cover for: Who Wants to Be a Jewish Writer?: And Other Essays, Adam Kirsch
Book Cover for: The Blessing and the Curse: The Jewish People and Their Books in the Twentieth Century, Adam Kirsch
Book Cover for: Why Trilling Matters, Adam Kirsch
Book Cover for: Rocket and Lightship: Essays on Literature and Ideas, Adam Kirsch
Book Cover for: The Thousand Wells: Poems, Adam Kirsch
Book Cover for: Invasions: New Poems, Adam Kirsch

Praise for this book


"Out of memory's dreamlike whoosh, Adam Kirsch fixes scenes of his Californian boyhood in flowing blank verse, holding each cameo up to the light then setting it back down with 'the reckless joy of getting rid.' Most moving are the child's deep misgivings about a world he can only begin to know in fits and starts, the unnerving self-doubt that resolves itself into poetry. This is an artist's coming-of-age for the ages. It took my breath away." --David Yezzi, author of Black Sea

"'There is no I, ' writes Adam Kirsch, 'to be born or die.' His new collection takes the stuff of selfhood--memories, longings, disappointments--and gives them 'a decent burial in words.' It is an autobiography, a farewell, and a reckoning, best illuminated by his own culminating image of a bonfire--or, perhaps, a funeral pyre--incinerating the fond vestiges of childhood and adolescence. Each act of disposal is an act of composition, and in these poems, Kirsch composes the years of his life into treasures." --Amit Majmudar, author of What He Did in Solitary


"The Discarded Life is a wonderfully seaworthy and streamlined vessel that carries us capably through the treacherous straits of youth and the pensive, open seas of adulthood." --Leslie Monsour, The Los Angeles Review of Books


"Kirsch writes poetry that is self-effacing but not abject, whose formal audacity is undercut by its sense of perspective. The poet's mind, Kirsch seems to suggest, grows when it knows its limits."--Anahid Nersessian, The New York Review of Books