My Childhood in Pieces: A Stand-Up Comedy, a Skoki

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.