"At a time when empathy itself has come into question, Adam Scheffler intervenes with a smart, perceptive, thorough, and wonderfully sympathetic account of James Wright's highly empathic poetry, its formal inventiveness and human reach, and its stunningly American music. So this is what it feels like to read a marvelous young critic rethinking the work of a major American poet." - Edward Hirsch, president, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
"Scheffler's writing is perspicacious, lucid, and original. I can think of few contemporary critics with his talent. What's most impressive is the way his clarity of expression is endorsed at every turn by genuine and deep care for the work at hand. Scheffler's grace of style derives from his formal talent as a prose writer, but also from true feeling." - Peter Campion, author of Radical as Reality: Form and Freedom in American Poetry
