Adam Kirsch

Adam Kirsch (born 1976) is an American poet and literary critic. He is on the seminar faculty of Columbia University's Center for American Studies, and has taught at YIVO.

Life and career Kirsch was born in Los Angeles in 1976. He is the son of lawyer, author, and biblical scholar Jonathan Kirsch. He started writing poetry around the age of 14, after encountering the work of T.S. Eliot: "Eliot showed me the possibility of finding in poetry a source of complex intellectual and moral interest." and began his career as assistant literary editor for The New Republic. Next he worked as the editor for Lipper Publications.

For a while, Kirsch made his living as a freelance writer, and he has regularly written freelance articles for many different publications including Slate, The New Yorker, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times Book Review, and Poetry. Richard John Neuhaus, writing in First Things, called Kirsch "a literary critic of some distinction." Writing in The Nation, John Palattella describes Kirsch as "the intellectual offspring of the New Formalists." The New York Times Book Review article by the poet David Lehman was far more negative. He characterized the book as having "a flawed thesis, a few valuable readings of poems and a mess of missed opportunities." But in a review in The New York Times, critic Michiko Kakutani praised the book, calling it "eloquent and very astute." She added: Mr. Kirsch ... does a wonderfully nimble job of conveying each poet's individual achievement and the evolution of his or her style, as apprenticeship gave way to maturity, as new techniques and language were invented to accommodate new ideas and material. Writing in a manner that is at once erudite and accessible, Mr. Kirsch proves equally adept at dispensing the sort of close readings of individual poems championed by the New Critics and at explicating correspondences between a poet's life and art in a fashion that would have been anathema to the high modernists.

The Thousand Wells The critic Ken Tucker wrote a highly critical review of Kirsch's first book of poetry, The Thousand Wells, writing, "Steely technical skill often contradicts the tender feelings and humility invoked throughout Adam Kirsch's first poetry collection. In 'A Love Letter,' he asserts, 'all my powers, poetic, analytical,/Cannot do justice to the theme,' but it's actually the stilted rhymes ('glosses/colossus'; 'momentous /portentous') and the familiarity of images like 'love waxes and wanes,/But, like the hide-and-go-seek of the moon,/It is only hiding, never really gone' that prevent Kirsch from sustaining his meditations on romantic love, city life and religion." But Booklist gave the book a positive review, stating that the book contained no "bad" poems and that "regardless of subject and tone, these are, because of their forms, poems of wit."

Invasions and The Modern Element In Poetry, the poet Carmine Starnino wrote a review of two of Kirsch's books published around the same time: Invasions (a book of poems) and The Modern Element (a book of literary criticism). In his review, Starnino focused on Kirsch's status as a poet-critic and how the role of poet-critics in America's literary culture had changed since the heyday of poet-critics in the first half of the 20th century. Regarding The Modern Element, Starnino wrote that Kirsch is "an incomparable context builder, with a near-perfect nose for comparisons. . . [and] is excellent at placing poets in their historical moment, aided by an ability to evoke the way the climate of a period manner can suddenly be made to pivot into the private weather of a poem." Starnino also had mostly positive things to say regarding Invasions which he called "an advance on the 'silent, parcelled, and controlled' poems of the award-winning The Thousand Wells." Startino also noted that the style and form of the poems in Invasions was heavily influenced by the work of Robert Lowell, particularly Lowell's sonnet sequence in the book History. Starnino's only criticism of the poems was that he believed that Kirsch's wording could sometimes seem antiquarian and that his strictness with regard to form could be limiting. Starnino also implied that Kirsch's commitment to strict formalism would guarantee his work a very limited audience. Hammer also criticized the poems for being too "cautious and rueful" and without passion.

Other work In a review of Kirsch's nonfiction book Why Trilling Matters, William Giraldi of The Daily Beast praised the Trilling book as well as Kirsch's previous nonfiction works:

Kirsch also generated controversy when writing an article for the Wall Street Journal titled "Is It Time To Retire the Term 'Genocide'?" in 2023 in response to the Israel-Palestine Conflict.

Kirsch's 2024 book On Settler Colonialism was published in the midst of the Gaza war, during which the use of the term Settler Colonialism surged, mainly in academic circles. The book argued that the vast majority of early Zionists came to Israel as refugees; Israelis have nowhere to return to, unlike settler colonialists such as the French in Algeria or Vietnam; and Jews are indigenous to the land of Israel. He suggested that settler colonialist ideology (SCI) lacks appeal to indigenous peoples, since it does not improve their situation. The book was both praised and criticized in a review published in Kirkus Reviews, which was titled "A rigorous moral reckoning falters by leaving out half of the equation."