Poet and literary critic Adam Kirsch was born in Los Angeles and earned his BA from Harvard. He is the author of three collections of poetry: The Thousand Wells (2002), selected for the New Criterion Poetry Prize; Invasions (2008); and Emblems of the Passing World: Poems After Photographs by August Sanders (2015). Kirsch is known as an exacting formalist; he frequently works with traditional values and techniques such as meter and rhyme. As a critic, Kirsch is similarly interested in conserving traditional poetry and poetics. His books of criticism include The Wounded Surgeon: Confession and Transformations in Six American Poets (2005), The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry (2008), Rocket and Lightship: Essays on Literature and Ideas (2014), The People and the Books: 18 Classics of Jewish Literature (2016), and The Global Novel: Writing the World in the 21st Century (2017). He has also written biographical studies, including Benjamin Disraeli (2008) and Why Trilling Matters (2011). He is currently editing Trilling’s letters.
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