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My Childhood in Pieces
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  • Published: 1 July 2025
  • ISBN: 9780593802823
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $74.99

My Childhood in Pieces

A Stand-Up Comedy, a Skokie Elegy

Formats & editions
EBook
3 June 2025
Audiobook
3 June 2025
Hardback
1 July 2025
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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.
  • Published: 1 July 2025
  • ISBN: 9780593802823
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $74.99
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About the author

Edward Hirsch

EDWARD HIRSCH, a MacArthur Fellow, has published nine previous books of poetry, including The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems and Gabriel: A 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 bestseller, 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.
portrait photo of Edward Hirsch

Also by Edward Hirsch

Stranger by Night
Gabriel
Special Orders
Lay Back the Darkness
The Night Parade
Wild Gratitude
On Love
See all

Praise for My Childhood in Pieces

Praise for Edward Hirsch's work:

  • “Bring[s] new life to the elegy. . . . Consummate, passionate, generous, and resplendent, Hirsch’s poems vanquish the static of our lives and guide us back to a place of contemplation and gratitude.” —Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)
  • “Tender and unflinching. . . . Hirsch balances heartfelt elegy with a celebration of the everyday. . . . While later poems address Hirsch’s loss of eyesight, giving resonance to the collection’s title, readers will be grateful that the poet’s inner eye remains as observant and compassionate as ever.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
  • "What makes Hirsch so singular in American poetry is the balance he strikes between the quotidian and something completely other—an irrational counterforce, the 'living fire' that gives its name to his new selected poems. . . . The everyday and the otherworldly temper each other in these excellent poems, and American poetry gains new strength as a result." —Peter Campion, The New York Times Books Review