With all the generosity and mastery we have come to expect from out three-time Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky has written a bold, lyrical meditation on identity and culture as hybrid and fluid, violent as well as creative: the enigmatic, maybe universal, condition of the foundling. At the Foundling Hospital considers the foundling soul: its need to be adopted, and its need to be adaptive. These poems reimagine identity on the scale of one life or of human history: from "the emanation of a dead star still alive" to the "pinhole iris of your mortal eye."
What is a particular person? How unique? What is anyone born as? Born with? Born into? The poems of Robert Pinsky's At the Foundling Hospital engage personality and culture as improvised from loss: a creative effort so pervasive it can be invisible.
"[Pinsky's] poems are methodical, carefully built, heady . . . gently sarcastic, and very good . . . But, Pinsky also suggests with no small amount of irony and wit in this prescient book, we've left bread crumbs in the language to help us find our way back to sanity, if only we'll follow them."
Craig Morgan Teicher, Los Angeles Times
"Pinsky's erudite, jaunty, and finely distilled lyrics keenly consider genesis, ancestors know and concealed, enslaved and displaced, and our myriad attempts to define the cosmos and ourselves. Pinsky offers cunningly piquant catalog poems: biblical, skeptical, whimsical litanies of our endeavors and failures, from language itself to myth, religion, dance, jazz, and comic strips to war and environ
Donna Seaman, Booklist
"Resonant . . . Stunning . . . These poems, with their careful word choices and refined music, demand multiple readings and reveal more each time. The collection, like two dying friends in one piece, leave 'A shape distinct and present in the mind.'"
