Trajectories

Poetry. As if Freud, Woody Allen, and Larkin had born an unlikely love child in the 1930s, here comes Sam Eisenstein - the octogenarian debut poet from Pasadena. Charting a lifetime of marital, parental, and existential experiences, Eisenstein is both funny and achingly sad. Here is a poet who has spent decades analysing the world from his acerbic, informed, and humanist perspective. Rarely has a book of poems presented, with such searing integrity, this bleak a vision of how Americans live - and die - in this late capitalist time of terror and desire.