Failure: A Poetry Collection - Paperback

by Philip Schultz (Author)

This superb Pulitzer Prize-winning collection gives voice to failure with a wry, deft touch from one of this country's most engaging and uncompromising poets. In Failure, Philip Schultz evokes the pleasures of family, marriage, beaches, and dogs; New York City in the 1970s; revolutions both interior and exterior; and the terrors of 9/11 with a compassion that demonstrates he is a master of the bittersweet and fierce, the wondrous and direct, and the brilliantly provocative. Filled with poems of "heartbreaking tenderness that [go] beyond mere pity" (Gerald Stern), Failure is a collection to savor from this major American poet.

Front Jacket

Philip Schultz is a hell of a poet, one of the very best of his generation, full of slashing language, good rhythms, surprises, and the power to leave you meditating in the cave of his poems.
--Norman Mailer
A driven immigrant father, an old poet, Isaac Babel in the author s dreams 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, 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 new collection from one of America s great poets. "

Back Jacket

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR FAILURE
"Philip Schultz's language reminds me of such modern masters as Isaac Rosenberg and Hart Crane. It's one thing I've always admired in his poetry; that and a heartbreaking tenderness that goes beyond mere pity and that is so present in Failure. It's as if he bears our pain." -Gerald Stern, winner of the National Book Award
"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
"Call it a poetry of the multiple truths of the all-too-human, the American language profoundly shaped into inclusively, powerfully felt passion. Philip Schultz's Failure is a book of poems of the highest achievement by one of American poetry's longtime masters of the art."--Lawrence Joseph

"Plantive and jubilant, the melody dissolves everything between itself and the firmament, underscoring Schultz's remarkable capacity for empathy with his fellow creatures. Here as elsewhere, his resolve to exult, even in the face of desolation and adversity, make Failure a....splendid book." --Floyd Collins, Gettysburg Review"