Failure

A Pulitzer Prize–winning poetry collection of “heartbreaking tenderness” (Gerald Stern).   A driven immigrant father; an old poet; Isaac Babel in the author’s Philip Schultz gives voice to failures in poems that are direct and wry. He evokes other lives, too—family, beaches, dogs, the pleasures of marriage, the terrors of 9/11, New York City in the 1970s (“when nobody got up before noon, wore a suit/or joined anything”)—and a mind struggling with revolutions both interior and exterior. Failure is a superb collection, “full of slashing language, good rhythms [and] surprises” (Norman Mailer).   “Philip Schultz’s poems have long since earned their own place in American poetry. His stylistic trademarks are his great emotional directness and his intelligent haranguing—of god, the reader, and himself. He is one of the least affected of American poets, and one of the fiercest.” —Tony Hoagland