Phillip Lopate

A long-awaited new book on personal writing from Phillip Lopate—celebrated essayist, the director of Columbia University’s nonfiction program, and editor of The Art of the Personal Essay .Distinguished author Phillip Lopate, editor of the celebrated anthology The Art of the Personal Essay, is universally acclaimed as “one of our best personal essayists” ( Dallas Morning News ).Here, combining more than forty years of lessons from his storied career as a writer and professor, he brings us this highly anticipated nuts-and-bolts guide to writing literary nonfiction.A phenomenal master class shaped by Lopate’s informative, accessible tone and immense gift for storytelling, To Show and To Tell reads like a long walk with a favorite professor—refreshing, insightful, and encouraging in often unexpected ways.

East Side, West Side, from the Little Red Lighthouse to Battery Park City, the wonders of Manhattan's waterfront are both celebrated and secret -- hidden in plain sight. In his brilliant exploration of this defining yet neglected shoreline, personal essayist Philip Lopate also recovers a part of the city's soul. A native New Yorker, Lopate has embraced Manhattan by walking every inch of its perimeter, telling stories on the way of pirates (Captain Kidd) and power brokers (Robert Moses), the lowly shipworm and Typhoid Mary, public housing in Harlem and the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. He evokes the magic of the once bustling old port from Melville's and Whitman's day to the era of the longshoremen in On the Waterfront, while appraising today's developers and environmental activists, and probing new plans for parks and pleasure domes with river views. Whether escorting us into unfamiliar, hazardous crannies or along a Beaux Arts esplanade, Waterfront is a grand literary ramble and defense of urban life by one of our most perceptive observers.

“Immensely readable essays.…[Phillip Lopate] remains ‘a storyteller at heart’ who can liven up any subject with nimble anecdotes from his life.…Delightful” (The New York Times Book Review).In this stunning collection of personal essays, distinguished author Phillip Lopate weaves together the colorful threads of a life well lived and takes us on an invigorating and thoughtful journey through memory, culture, parenthood, the trials of marriage both young and old, and an extraordinary look at New York’s storied past and present.Lopate has long been considered one of our most important, groundbreaking essayists, and this newest collection has been widely celebrated as among his best. Portrait Inside My Head was listed in The New Yorker’s “Books to Watch Out For” and praised by The New York Times Book Review as “riveting [and] arresting,” with “sculptured scenes worthy of fiction.” Hailed as “America’s Montaigne” by the Baltimore City Paper and compared to “Henry Roth and early Saul Bellow” by the Christian Science Monitor, Lopate has an easy, conversational style that pushes his piercing insights to new depths, celebrating the life of the mind and illuminating memories and feelings both distant and immediate. The result is a charming and spirited new book from the undisputed master of the form.

Book by Lopate, Phillip

Selected as one of Oprah.com’s 20 Tantalizing Beach ReadsCelebrated essayist Phillip Lopate proves himself a master of the short novel form in this inspired pairing of novellas portraying two less-than-perfect unions.The Stoic's Marriage chronicles the life of newlyweds Gordon and Rita. Well-off, idle Gordon, a lifelong student of philosophy who has always had a stunted capacity for happiness, first meets the enchanting Rita when she comes to his home as a nurse's aid sent to care for his dying mother. The attraction is instant and a marriage proposal ensues. Gordon turns to his diary to record his uxoriousness and to expound on the merits of Stoicism, the philosophy he's adopted as his substitute religion. When Rita's cousin from the Philippines arrives one Christmas, setting in motion an outrageous and hilarious sequence of events, both Gordon's stoicism and marriage vows are put to the test.Eleanor, or, The Second Marriage recounts one seemingly golden weekend in the lives of Eleanor and Frank, whose Brooklyn townhouse is a gathering place for their circle of cultured, cosmopolitan friends.It is Saturday morning, and Frank and Eleanor are planning the dinner they will host to celebrate the visit of a famous actor friend. These preparations are interrupted by the arrival of Frank's son, a young man deeply troubled by his own aimlessness. Other guests arrive, and in the midst of great conviviality, simmering tensions erupt into raucous emotional dramas.Elegant, concise, and comically devastating, Two Marriages illuminates the ways in which love is inseparable from deceit.

From the man who is practically synonymous with the form of the modern personal essay comes a delightful collection of prose, poems, and never-before-published pieces that span his career as an essayist, novelist, poet, film critic, father, son, and husband. Organized in six parts (Childhood; Youth; Early Marriage and Bachelorhood; Teaching and Work; Fiction; Politics, Religion, Movies, Books, Cities; The Style of Middle Age) Getting Personal tells two the development of Lopate's career as a writer and the story of his life.

Phillip Lopate has been obsessed with movies from the start. As an undergraduate at Columbia, he organized the school's first film society. Later, he even tried his own hand at filmmaking. But it was not until his ascent as a major essayist that Lopate found his truest and most lasting contribution to the medium. And, over the past twenty-five years, tackling subjects ranging from Visconti to Jerry Lewis, from the first New York Film Festival to the thirty-second, Phillip Lopate has made film his most cherished subject. Here, in one place, are the very best of these essays, a joy for anyone who loves movies.

"Not only an education but a joy. This is a book for the ages." --Rivka GalchenA monumental, canon-defining anthology of three centuries of American essays, from Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin to David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith.The essay form is an especially democratic one, and many of the essays Phillip Lopate has gathered here address themselves--sometimes critically--to American values. Even in those that don't, one can detect a subtext about being American.The Founding Fathers and early American writers self-consciously struggle to establish a recognizable national culture. The shining stars of the mid-nineteenth-century American Renaissance no longer lack confidence but face new reckonings with the oppression of blacks and women. The New World tradition of nature writing runs from Audubon, Thoreau, and John Muir to Rachel Carson and Annie Dillard. Marginalized groups in all periods use the essay to assert or to complicate notions of identity.Lopate has cast his net intentionally wide, embracing critical, personal, political, philosophical, humorous, literary, polemical, and autobiographical essays, and making room for sermons, letters, speeches, and columns dealing with a wide variety of subjects. Americans by birth as well as immigrants appear here, famous essayists alongside writers more celebrated for fiction or poetry. The result is an extensive overview of the endless riches of the American essay.

A dazzling anthology of essays by some of the best writers of the past quarter century—from Barry Lopez and Margo Jefferson to David Sedaris and Samantha Irby—selected by acclaimed essayist Phillip Lopate.The first decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed a blossoming of creative nonfiction. In this extraordinary collection, Phillip Lopate gathers essays by forty-seven of America’s best contemporary writers, mingling long-established eminences with newer voices and making room for a wide variety of perspectives and styles. The Contemporary American Essay is a monument to a remarkably adaptable form and a treat for anyone who loves fantastic writing. Hilton Als • Nicholson Baker • Thomas Beller • Sven Birkerts • Eula Biss • Mary Cappello • Anne Carson • Terry Castle • Alexander Chee • Teju Cole • Bernard Cooper • Sloane Crosley • Charles D’Ambrosio • Meghan Daum • Brian Doyle • Geoff Dyer • Lina Ferreira • Lynn Freed • Rivka Galchen • Ross Gay • Louise Glück • Emily Fox Gordon • Patricia Hampl • Aleksandar Hemon • Samantha Irby • Leslie Jamison • Margo Jefferson • Laura Kipnis • David Lazar • Yiyun Li • Phillip Lopate • Barry Lopez • Thomas Lynch • John McPhee • Ander Monson • Eileen Myles • Maggie Nelson • Meghan O’Gieblyn • Joyce Carol Oates • Darryl Pinckney • Lia Purpura • Karen Russell • David Sedaris • Shifra Sharlin • David Shields • Floyd Skloot • Rebecca Solnit • Clifford Thompson • Wesley Yang

Notes on Sontag is a frank, witty, and entertaining reflection on the work, influence, and personality of one of the "foremost interpreters of . . . our recent contemporary moment." Adopting Sontag's favorite form, a set of brief essays or notes that circle around a topic from different perspectives, renowned essayist Phillip Lopate considers the achievements and limitations of his tantalizing, daunting subject through what is fundamentally a conversation between two writers. Reactions to Sontag tend to be polarized, but Lopate's account of Sontag's significance to him and to the culture over which she loomed is neither hagiography nor hatchet job. Despite admiring and being inspired by her essays, he admits a persistent ambivalence about Sontag. Lopate also describes the figure she cut in person through a series of wry personal anecdotes of his encounters with her over the years.Setting out from middle-class California to invent herself as a European-style intellectual, Sontag raised the bar of critical discourse and offered up a model of a freethinking, imaginative, and sensual woman. But while crediting her successes, Lopate also looks at how her taste for aphorism and the radical high ground led her into exaggerations that could do violence to her own common sense, and how her ambition to be seen primarily as a novelist made her undervalue her brilliant essays. Honest yet sympathetic, Lopate's engaging evaluation reveals a Sontag who was both an original and very much a person of her time.

Cyrus Irani no acaba de encontrar su lugar en el mundo. Hijo de inmigrantes iraníes, culto, introvertido, se conforma con ver pasar los días desde su oscura tienda de alfombras del Upper West Side de Manhattan; pero el barrio, en pleno auge, está cambiando y el alquiler de la tienda está a punto de triplicarse. Por otro lado, y a pesar de la insistencia de su madre para que siente la cabeza, todavía no ha encontrado una mujer con la que compartir su vida.Los problemas se van multiplicando sin que su pasividad crónica, que hasta ahora le ha servido para vivir sin excesivas complicaciones, le permita hacerles frente. Empujado por la insistencia de su madre, sus amigos y su sobrino punk, Cyrus intentará zafarse de sus arraigadas y sedentarias costumbres.Ingeniosa y rica en matices, El mercader de alfombras es también una novela sobre Nueva York y sobre su ocaso, sobre el final de unas formas de vida en la metrópolis de las que el tendero Cyrus es uno de sus últimos testimonios.

A one-of-a-kind anthology of American essays on a wide range of subjects by a dazzling array of mid-century writers at the top of their form—from Normal Mailer to James Baldwin to Joan Didion—s elected by acclaimed essayist Phillip LopateThe three decades that followed World War II were an exceptionally fertile period for American essays. The explosion of journals and magazines, the rise of public intellectuals, and breakthroughs in the arts inspired a flowering of literary culture. At the same time, the many problems that confronted mid-century America—racism, sexism, nuclear threat, war, poverty, and environmental degradation among them—proved fruitful topics for America's best minds.In The Golden Age of the American Essay, Phillip Lopate assembles a dazzling array of famous writers, critics, sociologists, theologians, historians, activists, theorists, humorists, poets, and novelists. Here are writers like James Agee, E. B. White, A. J. Liebling, Randall Jarrell, and Mary McCarthy, pivoting from the comic indignities of daily life to world peace, consumerism, and restaurants in Paris. Here is Norman Mailer on Jackie Kennedy, Vladimir Nabokov on Lolita, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail," and Richard Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." Here are Gore Vidal, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, John Updike, Joan Didion, and many more, in a treasury of brilliant writing that has stood the test of time.

A compelling celebration of the power of the essay, this collection of 47 writings offers a glimpse into the mind of a modern-day Montaigne as he reflects on the miscellany of daily life—movies and art, friends and family—over the course of a single year.The essay is the most pluckily pedestrian and blithely transgressive of literary genres, the one that is most at large and in need, picking through the accumulated disjecta of daily life and personal and social history to take what it needs and remake it as it sees fit. It is, at its lively best, quite indifferent to the claims of style, fashion, theory, and respectability, provoking and inspiring through the pleasure of surprise. In 2016, Philip Lopate, who has been writing essays and thinking about the essay for decades now, turned his attention to one of the essay's offshoots, the blog, a form by that time already thick, as he knew, with virtual dust. Lopate committed to writing a weekly blog about, really, whatever over the course of a year, a quicker pace of delivery than he'd ever undertaken and one that carried the risk of all too regularly falling short. What emerged was A Year and a Day, a collection of forty-seven essays best characterized as a single essay a year in the making, a virtuosic (if never showy) demonstration of the essay's range and reach, meandering, looping back, pressing reset, forging on. Lopate's topics along the way include family, James Baldwin, a trip to China, Agnes Martin, Abbas Kiarostami, the resistible rise of Donald Trump, death, desire, and the tribulations, small and large, of daily life. What results is at once a self-portrait, a picture of the times, and a splendid new elaboration of what the essay can be.

Great book!

In 1984, Phillip Lopate sat down with his mother, Frances, to listen to her life story. A strong, resilient, indomitable woman who lived through the major events of the twentieth century, she was orphaned in childhood, ran away and married young, and then reinvented herself as a mother, war factory worker, candy store owner, community organizer, clerk, actress, and singer. But paired with exciting anecdotes are the criticisms of the husband who couldn’t satisfy her, the details of numerous affairs and sexual encounters, and, though she succeeded at many of her roles, accounts of how she always felt mistreated, taken advantage of. After the interviews, at a loss for what to do with the tapes, Lopate put them away. But thirty years later, after his mother had passed away, Lopate found himself drawn back to the recordings of this conversation. Thus begins a three-way conversation between a mother, his younger self, and the person he is today. Trying to break open the family myths, rationalizations, and self-deceptions, A Mother’s Tale is about family members who love each other but who can’t seem to overcome their mutual mistrust. Though Phillip is sympathizing to a point, he cannot join her in her operatic displays of self-pity and how she blames his father for everything that went wrong. His detached, ironic character has been formed partly in response to her melodramatic one. The climax is an argument in which he tries to persuade her—using logic, of all things—that he really does love her, but is only partially successful, of course. A Mother’s Tale is about something primal and the relationship between a mother and her child, the parent disappointed with the payback, the child, now fully grown, judgmental. The humor is in the details.

In the 1960s, prizewinning writer Philip Lopate went into an urban school to teach poetry and became a part of the school community. Being with Children , first published in 1975 but out of print for many years, is Lopate’s classic account of his relationship to his craft and to his young students. Hailed by the New York Times as “a wise and tender portrait of a small society,” Lopate’s book explores the horrible and beautiful aspects of being with young people five hours a day, and explains why teachers persist in staying with the public schools and trying to make them into places where young people can flower.

Phillip Lopate fell hard for the movies as an adolescent. As he matured into an acclaimed critic and essayist, his infatuation deepened into a lifelong passion. My Affair with Art House Cinema presents Lopate’s selected essays and reviews from the last quarter century, inviting readers to experience films he found exhilarating, tantalizing, and beguiling—and sometimes disappointing or frustrating—through his keen eyes.In an essayist’s sinuous prose style, Lopate captures the formal mastery, artistic imagination, and emotional intensity of art house essentials like Yasujirō Ozu’s Late Spring, David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, as well as works by contemporary filmmakers such as Maren Ade, Hong Sang-soo, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Christian Petzold, Paolo Sorrentino, and Jafar Panahi. Essays explore Chantal Akerman’s rigorous honesty, Ingmar Bergman’s intimacy, Abbas Kiarostami’s playfulness, Kenji Mizoguchi’s visual style, and Frederick Wiseman’s vision of the human condition. Lopate also reflects on the work of fellow critics, including Roger Ebert, Pauline Kael, and Jonathan Rosenbaum. His considered, at times contrarian critiques and celebrations will inspire readers to watch or rewatch these films. Above all, this book showcases Lopate’s passionate advocacy for not only particular films and directors but also the joys and value of a filmgoing culture.

Phillip Lopate's richest and most ambitious book yet--the final volume of a trilogy that began with Bachelorhood and Against Joie de Vivre--Portrait of My Body is a powerful memoir in the form of interconnected personal essays. One of America's foremost essayists, who helped focus attention on the form in his acclaimed anthology The Art of the Personal Essay, Lopate demonstrates here just how far a writer can go in the direction of honesty and risk taking.In thirteen essays, Lopate explores the resources and limits of the self, its many disguises, excuses, and unmaskings, with his characteristic wry humor and insight. From the title essay, a hilarious physical self-exam, to the haunting portrait of his ex-colleague Donald Barthelme, to the bittersweet account of his long-delayed surrender to marriage, "On Leaving Bachelorhood," Lopate wrestles with finding the proper balance between detachment and empathy, doubt and conviction. In other essays, he celebrates his love of film and city life, and reflects on his religious identity as a Jew. A wrenchingly vivid, unforgettable portrait of the author's eccentric, solipsistic, aged father, a self-proclaimed failure, is the centerpiece of a suite of essays about father-figures and resisted mentors. The book ends with the author's own introduction to fatherhood, as witness to the birth of his daughter. A book that will engage readers with its conversational eloquence, skeptical intelligence, candor, and mischief, Portrait of My Body is a captivating work of literary nonfiction.

From the man whose name is synonymous with the contemporary personal essay, Getting Personal is a rich and ambitious collection that spans Phillip Lopate's career as an essayist, teacher, film critic, father, son, and husband. Witty, insightful, deeply meditative, and self-revelatory, with his characteristic candor and curmudgeonly charm, he explores himself, his life, his family, his religion, and his friends.

Hidden pockets of wilderness still exist within the urban environs of New York City, and in Legacy Joel Meyerowitz invites us to discover them. This beautiful body of work is the result of a unique commission Meyerowitz received from the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation to document the city's parks. During the course of this project, Meyerowitz honed in on the 8,700 acres within the five boroughs of New York City that still exist in their original pristine state, as well as areas within parks that have been left to revert to wilderness. In creating this work, Meyerowitz has drawn on his own childhood memories of a New York that included "green space--open and wild, alive with rabbits, migratory birds, snakes, frogs and the occasional skunk--[that] gave me my first sense of the natural world, its temperament and its seasons, its unpredictability and its mystery." Through this rich compendium of images of parks, shorelines and forests, Meyerowitz's magnificent project transports the viewer into the heart of a lush wilderness, while contextualizing these nooks of nature as an inextricable part of city life today.Joel Meyerowitz (born in New York, 1938) is an award-winning photographer whose work has appeared in over 350 exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world. He is a two-time Guggenheim fellow, a recipient of both NEA and NEH awards, as well as a recipient of the Deutscher Fotobuchpreis. He has published over 15 books, including Cape Light (1978) and The World Trade Center Archive (2006). He lives in New York.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the Port of New York was the center of a huge maritime enterprise. Through this hub passed vessels and cargoes of every description, heading to or arriving from anywhere and everywhere around the globe. For much of the first half of the twentieth century, it was here that America's commerce with Europe and Central and South America converged. In this busiest port in the world, seasoned sailors and fishermen, international traders, muscled longshoremen, barge brats, and yachters shaped and shared New York's waterfront world. By 1960 maritime New York had greatly diminished, eclipsed by more efficient operations elsewhere. Fortunately, a small cadre of commercial photographers documented the dynamic social, economic, and political forces in the heyday of the wharves, waterways, and waterfront markets, capturing for the ages the gritty and sometimes glamorous life of the docks and their environs.

In this second installment of The Anchor Essay Annual series, acclaimed essayist Phillip Lopate has selected and introduced the year's most notable, influential, or surprising essays published during the last twelve months. Including material from periodicals and books, The Anchor Essay Annual 1998 also features essays that have never before appeared in print and those published only abroad. The result is as cosmopolitan as it is unique.Included in the 1998 Annual Lucy Grealy's reasoned path to belief in "My God," David Lazar's fierce reappraisal of a young man's wish to blend into goyische America in "Further Father," Mary Oliver's rumination on connectedness to the world in "Sister Turtle," and Jane Shapiro's magnificent dialogue on the afterlife of the divorced woman in "This Is What You Need for a Happy Life."All of this exciting new work is placed in context by an illuminating, in-depth introduction from Phillip Lopate, himself one of our most acclaimed essayists. With generous selections from over twenty-five writers from around the world, The Anchor Essay The Best of 1998 continues to build on Anchor's most exciting new series.

Published to accompany a major exhibition exemplifying John Koch's finest works from the 1950s to the 1970s, this is the first book to explore the life and work of this self-taught artist, renowned for his painting of New York life. Spending over 4 years in Paris studying classic works at the Louvre, he developed a formidable technique, evident in his beautiful rendering of the light playing on surfaces. According to those who knew him, John Koch composed his persona as carefully as he arranged his still lifes and interiors. His wife, Dora Zaslavsky, was an esteemed piano coach, and together they created a private world, as Koch wrote, 'out of the substance of the city'. Typified by his interest in the interaction between people and the space around them, as well as the interplay of music and art, Koch's work resisted the prevalent trend towards abstraction. Instead it recorded members of John and Dora's circle (artists, writers and musicians), who participated in the European-style salon as an oasis of high culture and refinement in New York City.

Now in its third year, this annual collection presents the most notable, influential, and surprising essays published in the last twelve months in either books or periodicals throughout the English-speaking world. Selected with consummate taste and a catholic openness to style and subject matter by famed essayist, critic, and editor, Phillip Lopate, the 1999 edition demonstrates that the form continues its renaissance as an unrivaled vehicle of intelligence and sensibility.For this edition, Lopate has paired his tewnty-eight selections by topic, which offers suprising parallels and divergences in points of view. Andre Dubus and Tom Beller on apprentice work as a form of true experience; Richard Rorty and George Packer on the quixotic and often self-defeating character of the American left; Siri Hustvedt and Wayne Koestenbaum on the verities of erotic experience; Bliss Broyard and M. G. Stephens on their fathers; Marcus Laffey and Charles Bowden on violence, crime, and police work; Susan Sontag and Martha Nussbaum on the necessity and consolation of art--these are just some of the peerless practitioners of the essay featured in this superb collection.All of this exciting new work is placed in context by an equally superb introductory essay by Lopate. A special feature of this 1999 edition is an appendix in which literary and intellectual notables nominate their selections of the best and most influential essays and essayists of the century. This prestigious Anchor annual is more than ever an unequaled showcase for an indispensable and ever-changing literary form.

The poet John Ashbery wrote of Rudy Burckhardt in 1980: "Before there was an underground, there was Rudy Burckhardt. The genial, Swiss-born jack-of-all-trades and master of several has remained unsung for so long that he is practically a subterranean monument." Since that time Burckhardt's reputation has steadily grown - as photographer, filmmaker, and painter - beyond Manhattan's downtown community of artists in which he lived and worked. For six decades Rudy Burckhardt (1914-1999) was a discreet, but enduring, and ultimately important figure in New York's avant-garde art world.Born in Basel, Switzerland, Burckhardt immigrated to the United States in 1935 to escape the Swiss Army and stultifying cultural and social atmosphere, to look for adventure far from home. He soon found himself sharing a loft with then companion and lifelong friend, the poet and dance critic, Edwin Denby. Willem de Kooning lived next door. (Together with Denby, Burckhardt was one of the first serious collectors of de Kooning's work.) Aaron Copland, Virgil Thompson, and Paul Bowles were good friends of his. And soon Burckhardt was embarking on a profound photographic portrait of New York the midday crowds in midtown Manhattan, storefronts and standpipes, Astor Place, Times Square, the Flatiron Building, the gray, water-towered regions of Chelsea, the great swath of Sixth Avenue, humble curbs, fleeting shadows, a modest studio in Brooklyn, as well as the existentialist landscapes of Astoria and Laurel Hill in Queens - with its anonymous factory buildings, empty lots, broken sidewalks, and girdered highways over cement gardens against the great veil of the Manhattan skyline. He also photographer the great painters of the New York School, from Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko to Philip Guston, Larry Rivers, and Brice Marden. As well as the now classic images of New York, Burckhardt photographed London, Paris, Mediterranean cities, the segregated American South, Haiti, Trinidad, Mexico, and the forest and ferns of his summer retreats in Maine.Over the course of his life, Burckhardt was a link between succeeding generations of artist, poets, dancers, and filmmakers. Gradually, his standing as a cultural force has been acknowledged, not only as a photographer, bur also as a maker of underground films, and, in his later years, as a painter. This book is the first comprehensive monograph on Burckhardt's photography. Author Phillip Lopate, a long-time friend of the photographer, provides an insightful and thought-provoking homage to the quiet brilliance of a national treasure. And the poet and curator, Vincent Katz, has contributed an essay further elaborating on Burckhardt's photographic achievement. Illustrated with almost three hundred photographs, Rudy Burckhardt presents the remarkable depth and range of the artist's work. The book will fascinate anyone interested in the New York art world and offers a revelation for all those interested in photography.

Poetry. Though known today mostly as an essayist, Phillip Lopate worked seriously as a poet for fifteen years during the 1970s and 1980s. As Henri Cole "Phillip Lopate may be an American ambassador of nonfiction, but he is also a youthful, taciturn, love-seeking New York poet, whose poems--plainspoken, personal, darkly humorous--quietly gather strength while confronting the beautiful and ugly in city life. I admire their vitality and honesty."