As Easy As Lying: Essays on Poetry by H. L. Hix

Accessible, erudite, and ebullient, these essays delve into the workings of the poetic mind and offer incisive assessments of contemporary American poets and poetics. Hix not only maps the landscape, he reshapes it: taking on nabobs like John Ashbery (“Every age adores a few poets in whose work posterity maintains no interest”) and presenting such disparate figures as Charles Bernstein and Dana Goia in new light, discovering the missing link between the Neo-Formal and the Post-Modern. As Easy As Lying is the best book on Modern American poetry since
Robert Hass’s Twentieth Century Pleasures.

“Hix turns out keen metrics at once playful and soulful, suggesting that there may still be room for a philosophical modernist come lately.”—Harvard Review