A Pulitzer Prize–winning poetry collection of "heartbreaking tenderness" (Gerald Stern).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, 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 b...

Set in Rochester, New York, in the fifties, this extraordinary book-length sequence traces the year in a boy's life leading up to his bar mitzvah and passage into manhood. There is a lively mixture of ethnic groups here-many of them displaced by the war in Europe-with new hopes and dreams. It is a uniquely American place, where "no matter how far down you started from, you began again from the beginning."As the alternately elegiac and humorous poems conclude, the boy has become a m...

A Pulitzer Prize–winning poet examines the lives and sacrifices of his foremothers in his most personal collection yet.Philip Schultz is famous for his empathetic explorations of male shortcomings, primarily those of his late father. Enormous Morning, his incisive new volume, reflects on the sacrifices of women in their roles as mothers, wives, and friends, including those of his own mother, who was forced to support the family in the face of his father’s ...

Philip Schultz, winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, has been celebrated for his singular vision of the American immigrant experience and Jewish identity, his alternately fierce and tender portrayal of family life, and his rich and riotous evocation of city streets. His poems have found enthusiastic audiences among readers of Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac, Slate, The New Yorker, and other publications. His willingness to face down the demons of fai...

“Gripping, eloquent, moving, this is a powerful tale about what remains hidden and/or unspeakable in history.” —Elie WieselI, oneHenryk Stanislaw Wyrzykowski,Head Clerk of Closed Files,a department of one,work…in a forgotten well of ghostly sighsThis astonishing novel in verse tells the story of Henryk Wyrzykowski, a drifting, haunted young man hiding from the Vietnam War in the basement of a San Francisco welfare...

“A success story . . . proof that one can rise above the disease and defy its so-called limitations on the brain.”—Daily BeastDespite winning the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2008, Philip Schultz could never shake the feeling of being exiled to the "dummy class" in school, where he was largely ignored by his teachers and peers and not expected to succeed. Not until many years later, when his oldest son was diagnosed with dyslexia, did Schultz realize that ...

A vivid, intimate, and inspiring exploration of how to write through persona, from the Pulitzer Prize–winning founder of an influential writing school.Throughout his growth as a writer, acclaimed poet Philip Schultz has battled with the dark voice in his head—the “shitbird,” as his late friend the poet Ralph Dickey termed it—that whispers his insecurities and questions his ability to create. Persona writing, a method of borrowing the voice and temperament of accomp...

“Compelling. . . . [Schultz’s] works are replete with insights and nuggets of wisdom.”— Washington PostWith humor, irony, and celebration, Luxury explores the comfort and sustenance of life, the bittersweet clarity of aging, and the anxiety of existence.“A notable addition to a body of work that is durable, compelling, and instructive.” — David Wojahn“A snapshot of our malaise ‘one luminous, lost imagination at a time.’ ” — Mil...

An inspiring memoir of a Pulitzer Prize winner’s triumph over disabilityDespite being a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2008, Philip Schultz could never shake the feeling of being exiled to the “dummy class” in school, where he was largely ignored by his teachers and peers and not expected to succeed. Not until many years later, when his oldest son was diagnosed with dyslexia, did Schultz realize that he suffered from the same condition. In this moving memoir, Schultz tr...