100 Poems to Break Your Heart: A Program with Edward Hirsh

On Monday, April 26th at 6:30 PM, The Book Stall, an independent bookstore just north of Chicago, welcomes award-winning poet Edward Hirsch as we celebrate the release of his new anthology, 100 Poems to Break Your Heart. Mr. Hirsch will be in conversation with fellow poet Linda Gregerson, one of the contributors to the book. For anyone trying to process grief, loneliness, or fear, this collection of poetry will be your guide in trying times. This program is free and open to the public.

In 100 Poems to Break Your Heart, Hirsch selects 100 poems, from the nineteenth century to the present, and illuminates them, unpacking context and references to help the reader fully experience the range of emotion and wisdom within. In a starred review, Booklist says, “Who will reach for this assemblage of poems meant to break our hearts? Those who know that solace can be found in poetry and its assurance that one is not alone in facing heartbreak and loss, which is visited upon us in new and crushing ways in the time of COVID-19. Another draw is Hirsch himself, of course, a consummate poet all-too fluent in grief, whose radiant books about poetry have guided readers to a deeper appreciation for this endlessly surprising and affecting literary form.”

EDWARD HIRSCH is a celebrated poet and peerless advocate for poetry. A MacArthur fellow, he has published ten books of poems and six books of prose. He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Rome Prize, a Pablo Neruda Presidential Medal of Honor, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for literature. He serves as president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. and lives in Brooklyn.

LINDA GREGERSON’s honors include a Guggenheim fellowship, four Pushcart Prizes, a Kingsley Tufts Award, and the selection of Magnetic North as a National Book Award finalist. Gregerson is a professor at the University of Michigan. Her poetry appears in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Poetry, the Yale Review, and many other publications.