Also a Poet: Frank O'Hara, My Father, and Me

"Deeply moving and exceptionally well written, this offbeat memoir will please anyone interested in the NYC art scene from the 1950s on."

"Fluidly morphing, magnetically candid ..."

"What happens next is a sincere and expressive portrayal of a fraught but tender relationship between a daughter and her father, at once intimately relatable to any child of an absent parent, yet singularly an honest – and regularly hilarious – account of two obsessive writers struggling in their own ways to connect."

"She crafts a masterpiece entirely her own ..."

"if, like me and countless others, you've loved Schjeldahl's art criticism — its acuity, its passion — and considered him (quoting a fan) 'the best art writer of our era … one of the best critics ever' — brace yourself."

"Still, she becomes disillusioned by dude-centric, mid-century Greenwich Village ..."

"By excerpting her father's interviews, Calhoun offers us a glimpse into her father's very substantial archive, 'vital to literary history,' and smuggles into print invaluable biographical sources that will, without intervention, 'ro[t], unheard, in an East Village basement.' After Granville-Smith's prohibition, we can appreciate this as the principled act that it is ..."

"A fascinating memoir ..."

"Calhoun's honesty and willingness to push beyond her own resentments make Also a Poet a potent account of a daughter reaching out to a perhaps unreachable father before it's too late."

"But it turned into something much less dutiful, and more interesting, a story about both the impossibility of reconstructing another person's life and the importance of trying ..."