About Adam Kirsch

Burning Wyclif by Thom Satterlee. Texas Tech University Press, 2006. $19.95 Sakura Park by Rachel Wetzsteon. Persea, 2006. $17.95 As Reviewed By: Adam Kirsch I read Burning Wyclif, Thom Satterlee’s debut collection, because it was recommended to me by a friend, without knowing anything about the book or the poet. If I had been told [...]

The Optimist by Joshua Mehigan. Ohio University Press, 2004. Hapax by A.E. Stallings. Triquarterly, 2006. As Reviewed By: Adam Kirsch To get a sense of the bleak and illusionless intelligence that animates Joshua Mehigan’s poetry, the best place to start is the title poem of his first collection, The Optimist. Optimism, of the quiet, bourgeois, [...]

The Hidden Model by David Yezzi. Triquarterly, 2003. Radiance by Joe Osterhaus. Zoo Press, 2002. As Reviewed by Adam Kirsch No instruction has ever been so eagerly and doubtfully obeyed as Ezra Pound’s famous “Make it new.” In twentieth and now twenty-first century American poetry, the new has been like the Ypres salient, constantly claimed [...]