My Childhood in Pieces: A Stand-Up Comedy, a Skokie Elegy

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. 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.

EDWARD HIRSCH, a MacArthur Fellow, has published nine previous books of poetry, including The Living FireNew and Selected Poems and GabrielA Poem, a book-length elegy for his son. He has also published seven books of prose, among them How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, a national best seller, and 100 Poems to Break Your Heart. He has received numerous prizes, including the National Book Critics Circle Award. A longtime teacher, at Wayne State University and in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston, Hirsch is now president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He lives in Brooklyn.