A driven immigrant father, an old poet, Isaac Babel in the author's dreams--Philip Schultz gives voice to failures in poems that are direct and wry. He evokes other lives, too--family, beaches, dogs, the pleasures of marriage, New York City in the 1970s, "when nobody got up before noon, wore a suit/or joined anything"--and a mind struggling with revolutions both interior and exterior. Failure is a superb new collection from one of America's great poets.