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, New York City in the 1970s, "when nobody got up before noon, wore a suit/or joined anything"—and a mind struggling with revolutions both interior and exterior. Failure is a superb new collection from one of America’s great poets.

One called him a nobody.

No, I said, he was a failure.

You can’t remember

a nobody’s name, that’s why

they’re called nobodies.

Failures are unforgettable.

—from "FAILURE"