The Thousand Wells: Poems

As a frequent reviewer for the New Republic and the New York Times, Adam Kirsch is one of the most visible of young poetry critics, but he also practices what he critiques. His debut collection, The Thousand Wells, won the New Criterion's Poetry Prize, and features 31 rhymed stanzaic lyrics in a diction elevated and hortatory-but not above humor. If Lowell was tamed by Miltown, Kirsch's ""Zoloft"" imagines ""misery/ Will take its place with polio and plague.../ While madness and possession, shame and sin/ Survive, like the humors or astrology,/ To make us smile at errors that have been,/ Or figures to adorn our poetry.""