Who's on First?

For more than four decades, readers and critics have found Lloyd Schwartzs poems unlike anyone elsesa rare combination of the heartbreaking and the hilarious. With his ear for the poetry of the vernacular, Schwartz offers us a memorable cast of charactersboth real and imagined, foolish and oracular. Readers experience his mothers piercing flashes of memory, the perverse comic wisdom of Gracie Allen, the uninhibited yet loving exhibitionists of antique pornography, and eager travelers crossing America in a club-car or waiting in a Brazilian airport. Schwartz listens to these people without judgingunderstanding that they are all trying to live their lives, whenever possible, with tenderness, humor, and grace. Whos on First? brings together a selection of poems from all of Schwartzs previous collections along with eagerly awaited new poems, highlighting his formal inventiveness in tangling and untangling the yarn of comedy and pathos. Underlying all of these poems is the question of what it takes and what it costs to make art.