Ada Calhoun

A staggering memoir from New York Times bestselling author Ada Calhoun tracing her fraught relationship with her father and their shared obsession with a great poet When Ada Calhoun stumbled upon old cassette tapes of interviews her father, celebrated art critic Peter Schjeldahl, had conducted for his never-completed biography of poet Frank O'Hara, she set out to finish the book her father had started forty years earlier. As a lifelong O'Hara fan who grew up amid his bohemian cohort in the East Village, Calhoun thought the project would be easy, even fun, but the deeper she dove, the more she had to face not just O'Hara's past, but also her father's, and her own. The result is a groundbreaking and kaleidoscopic memoir that weaves compelling literary history with a moving, honest, and tender story of a complicated father-daughter bond. Also a Poet explores what happens when we want to do better than our parents, yet fear what that might cost us; when we seek their approval, yet mistrust it. In reckoning with her unique heritage, as well as providing new insights into the life of one of our most important poets, Calhoun offers a brave and hopeful meditation on parents and children, artistic ambition, and the complexities of what we leave behind.

Frank O'Hara, My Father, and Me

Also a Poet

Annie Millman

The poems were simple like the Psalms are simple. The more times you repeat them the more they reveal- not just the meaning of the words but the message of the sound. They were about TV and Coke, coffee and movie stars and yet felt like incantations.

Art world observer Martha King wrote: "Even casual acquaintances could feel [Frank O'Hara's] 'our' about New York City. He lived in the glamorous swirl the gifted lonely can invent in a great city."

There is nothing quite like walking around New York City three-drinks-drunk after a heavy snowfall. It feels like waking up, finally, to find that you're in the center of the universe. That is the feeling characters always have in Dawn Powell novels and in Replacements songs. You're alive. You're dead. You're both at once.

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