Publishers Weekly
06/20/2022
In this vivid work, former U.S. poet laureate Pinsky (The Figured Wheel) catalogs his life in letters and reflects on the words and relationships that shaped him as a writer. He acts as his family’s historian, tracing his father’s life as the son of a Prohibition-era liquor distiller turned bar owner, and the life of his mother, the daughter of a nomadic family. Weaving through the past and present, Pinsky pauses on the formative moments that brought him toward poetry, such as chanting a haftorah at his shul in Long Branch, N.J., and forming a band in junior high, where he found respite from his struggles in the classroom through music. Soon, Pinsky exchanged his saxophone for a pen, honing his poetic craft among such luminaries as Henry Dumas and Peter Najarian at Rutgers in the early 1960s, and later at Stanford with respected writers and thinkers, including the abrasive but influential Yvor Winters. Pinsky’s anecdotes are as humorous and humble (“I heard a critique of how I pronounce words, and inside my armor it made me sweat”) as they are moving and reflective, and his concerns lie with poetry as much as they do the human condition. Pinsky acolytes and the poetry-inclined alike will savor every bit. (Oct.)
Provincetown Independent - Evan Carton
"[Pinsky’s] conviction about poetry’s abundant presence and democratic distribution animates [his] memoir.… [E]ntertaining.… His episodic and eclectic ‘song of myself,’ like Whitman’s, contains multitudes."
Russell Shorto
"What makes a great poet? Robert Pinsky provides some of the ingredients to his becoming an American original. We know that a language obsession will feed itself in unlikely places. But what places, exactly? Poetry craves particulars. Pinsky gives us Izzy Ash’s junkyard, the Tally-Ho Tavern, the magazines in the waiting room of his father’s optical shop, the library at Stanford University. He’s too wise to force cohesion. The result is a lyrical coming-of-age story centered around lyricism itself."
Jewish Book Council - Maron L. Waxman
"Candid, invigorating, personal, and humane.… [Jersey Breaks] is also a tribute to how a truly American life…can inspire a national culture founded on a love for poetry."
On the Seawall - Ron Slate
"The narrative’s recursive form, its avoidance of the strictly chronological and the usual memoirist’s ‘arc,’ allowed [Pinsky’s] materials to swirl, settling here and there in felicitous patterns of relation.… [Pinsky] tells his story by way of the sounds which have embodied it. Cesare Pavese wrote in his notebook, ‘The delight of art—perceiving that one’s own way of life can determine a method of expression.’ I hear that delight throughout Jersey Breaks."
Booklist
"[A] judiciously episodic and richly involving memoir.… In musical and transporting prose alive with bemusement, irony, and wonder, Pinsky celebrates the role of poetry in this life and ours."
Times Literary Supplement - Benjamin Shull
"Translating Dante and Czeslaw Milosz, ascending to the poet laureateship, founding the Favorite Poem Project and even appearing on an episode of The Simpsons.… [Pinsky] has remained, in every sense of the word, an American poet."
Meghan O’Rourke
"In his gripping memoir, Robert Pinsky chronicles his Jewish American upbringing in New Jersey and shows how it led him to poetry, vividly illuminating a disappearing time and place in America, and shining a light on what it means to be a poet. At once expansive and lyrical, historically significant and deeply intimate, Jersey Breaks tells an unforgettable story."
Martín Espada
"Robert Pinsky pays attention. That’s how he became an American poet: by hearing music even in the syllables of the conductor’s voice calling out, ‘Passengers going to Hoboken, change trains at Summit.’ Only such a poet, so attuned to the melody of language, could see the formidable feat of translating Dante as a matter of ‘metrical engineering.’ The other half of that phrase is important, too, since engineering is a question of work, and this is a chronicle of the working class, the memoir of an optician’s son, who understands that real work is essential to the creation and appreciation of poetry. (He was a distracted student, producing as hilarious proof here a report card only a future poet could generate.) This poet knows well that he owes his life as a poet to others—his recollections of teachers like Paul Fussell are particularly vivid—and so he was a generous poet laureate committed to the principle of service, listening to the voices of others. In that spirit, we should listen to the voice of Robert Pinsky, the intelligence and grace of his prose, his poetry, his song."
Carlin Romano
"There’s undeniable pleasure in Pinsky’s ruminating.… [His] stories contain…much appealing color and detail."
Boston Globe - Julia M. Klein
"‘I am an expert at nothing,’ [Robert] Pinsky writes in Jersey Breaks, with typical modesty and arguable accuracy, ‘except the sounds of sentences in the English language.’ For the poet’s fans, that turns out to be more than enough."
Library Journal
07/01/2022
Former U.S. poet laureate Pinksy reflects on key social and cultural issues as he moves from a Jewish boy's Jersey Shore childhood and close family ties to his days as a mouthy, dissenting student to his wide-ranging work as a teacher and writer, all told in a rich, pick-up-sticks stacking of ideas that's as genial, generous, and wildly playful as his poems.
Kirkus Reviews
2022-07-05
The acclaimed poet takes an affectionate look back.
The U.S. poet laureate from 1997 to 2000 and “an expert at nothing except the sounds of sentences in the English language,” Pinsky (b. 1940) moves back and forth in time, narrating his life in crisp, self-deprecating prose. “If I have a story to tell,” he writes, “it’s how the failures and aspirations of a certain time and place led to poetry.” That place was Long Branch, New Jersey, where the author grew up in an Orthodox, lower-middle-class family in a neighborhood that was both poor and segregated. In the “sounds of Hebrew,” Pinsky heard Milton, Blake, and Whitman. He recalls reading stories and poems in the glossy magazines in his optician father’s waiting room as well as the “exact moment when I became a writer,” thanks to Through the Looking Glass. As an “ambitious, pseudo-intellectual freshman” at Rutgers University, he encountered and enjoyed Ulysses and the poetry of William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, and Allen Ginsberg. Pinsky confesses that his way of writing a poem stems from getting a “tune in my head…like noodling at the piano,” and his approach fostered his popular Favorite Poem Project, which combined the “appeal of gossip with the appeal of art.” Though the author loved playing music, poetry came first in college, and he explains how his “habit of thinking about names was essential to my work as a poet.” He lavishes praise on two cantankerous college teachers—Paul Fussell and “relentless dictator” Yvor Winters—as well as his friend and mentor Thom Gunn. When teaching at Wellesley in 1970, Pinsky attended Robert Lowell’s “erratic writing workshop,” and Lowell gave him a blurb for his first collection, Sadness and Happiness. Throughout, the author sharply dissects a variety of poems, including his own, and he excitedly explains the welcome challenge of translating Dante’s Inferno.
Fans of literature will relish Pinsky’s jocular recollections and infectious love of poetry.
