From the award-winning poet, dark comic microbursts of prose deliver a whole childhood, at the hands of a not quite middle-class Jewish family whose hardboiled American brutality and wit were the forge of a poet's coming of age. "My grandparents taught me to write my sins on paper and cast them into the water on the first day of the New Year. They didn't expect an entire book," Hirsch says in the "prologue" to this glorious festival...