A Day Like Any Other

”[A] filigreed and astute presentation of [Schuyler’s] life.” –Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker

“A biography truly worthy of its subject: his humility and pride in accomplishment, his extraordinary ordinary life.” –Angela Ball, Best American Poetry

“Absorbing… Kernan has tracked down everything from Schuyler’s baby book and first-grade report card to his psychiatric records and US State Department papers. He has also conducted more than a hundred interviews. What emerges is the fullest picture we are ever likely to have of Schuyler’s life.” –Matthew Bevis, LRB

“ Written with exceptional sympathy and understanding … Kernan does justice to the[] intimacy [of the poems] as well as their unassertive grandeur, while telling a life story that is as amusing and melancholic as the poems themselves. ” –Andrew Motion, The New Statesman

“[Kernan] deftly incorporates brief explications of Schuyler’s poems that illuminate his life… This narrative is a page-turner of the best kind… Kernan describes Schuyler with a frank compassion, explicates his work incisively, and displays a deep historical knowledge.” –John Skoyles, Commonweal

“Insightful … Kernan’s excellent A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler compels us to delve further into James Schuyler’s oeuvre.” –Michael Londra, The Arts Fuse

”[Schuyler’s poetry] is one of the permanent joys of American literature, carved out of a life that had more than its portion of misery. Kernan’s invaluable book gives us a fuller sense of just how unlikely that miracle was.” –Evan Kindley, The Nation

“I discovered James Schuyler’s poems fifty years ago and the charm and the mystery of his poems has made him always my Number One. Now Jimmy’s life, so warmly and astutely told by Nathan Kernan, is here for us, a page-turner and a queer and passionate, glittering literary gem.” –Eileen Myles, author of a “Working Life”

“The most pastoral, and the most everyday transcendental, of the New York School poets, James Schuyler gifted us with iced-tea skies, gentian distances, and steampipes knocking like a metal heart. He looked unremarkably like a bus driver yet wrote like one of Rilke’s angels. At last, in A Day Like Any Other, we have a record of this mad, sad, modest, bemused, and passionate life, as well as meditations on the sublime poetry that tune into Schuyler’s frequency with crystal clarity. Nathan Kernan has written a perfectly pitched and masterly biography of one of our finest poets.” –Brad Gooch, author of City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara

“James Schuyler’s poetry is a celebration of the American language–the plainness with the layered depth, the rhythms of speech. This poetry may not change your life, but it does stop time. Nathan Kernan’s book is like being there. It’s a supreme accomplishment.” –Alex Katz

“Nathan Kernan’s passionate five-star biography of James Schuyler affords the reader an inti - mate look into the life of the truant poet of the so-called New York School, who seemed to have dropped in from ‘otherwhere.’ The biographer’s consummate skill in drawing telling inference from compelling implication matches his subject’s exacting method. A necessary book for all sent ‘otherwhere’ by poetry.” –James McCourt, author of Lasting City

“How fastidiously and imaginatively Nathan Kernan sounds the depths of James Schuyler’s genius, while leaving its ultimate sources beautifully mysterious! Because of Kernan’s magnificent biography, with its profound interpretations of individual poems and its graceful recounting of Schuyler’s ups and downs, we can appreciate how seemingly without effort his masterpieces floated freely above the stark, fitfully glamorous events, inner and outer, of the poet’s rocky existence. Kernan’s lucidity and tenderness, combined with a welcome objectivity, allow Schuyler’s strange life to seem at once melodramatic and contemplative– a quietness, sometimes storm-tossed, befitting the profane saint he secretly was.” –Wayne Koestenbaum, author of Stubble Archipelago

Nathan Kernan is the editor of The Diary of James Schuyler. He lives in New York.

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