Published by Louisiana State University Press

lsupress.org

Copyright © 2026 by Adam Scheffler

Cover Image: Freedom, 2025, by Emily Davis Adams. Oil on linen over panel, 5 × 7 in.


Advance Praise for So This Is What It Feels Like: Empathy in the Poetry of James Wright

“At a time when empathy itself has come into question, Adam Scheffler intervenes with a smart, perceptive, thorough, and wonderfully sympathetic account of James Wright’s highly empathic poetry, its formal inventiveness and human reach, its stunningly American music. So this is what it feels like to read a marvelous young critic rethinking the work of a major American poet.”
–Edward Hirsch, President, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation

 

“Adam Scheffler’s writing is perspicacious, lucid, and original. I can think of few contemporary critics with his talent. What’s most impressive to me is the way his clarity of expression is endorsed at every turn by genuine and deep care for the work at hand. Scheffler’s grace of style derives from his formal talent as a prose writer, but also from true feeling, and the simple fact that he “owns” his subject matter.” 
–Peter Campion, author of Radical as Reality: Form and Freedom in American Poetry      

 

“With refreshingly open-hearted and astute readings from the full range of the poems, Scheffler speaks persuasively of empathy as a fundamental quality and inspiration throughout James Wright’s work. Scheffler’s fluent grasp of the critical writing about the poet makes for an informed and generous conversation and a dynamic reconsideration of Wright’s achievement. Scheffler’s study helps restore Wright’s centrality to twentieth-century American poetry.”
–Jonathan Blunk, biographer, James Wright: A Life in Poetry

 

In his brilliant and timely So This Is What It Feels Like: Empathy in the Poetry of James Wright, Adam Scheffler reflects on the immense weight carried by one of America’s greatest and most humane poets. Scheffler pulls forward poems that overflow with struggling, impoverished, working-class people, and shows how Wright’s poems gave voice to the displaced and lost, the violent and the weak, the marginalized and misunderstood. I’m grateful that Scheffler is raising James Wright up to the light again, just when we need him most. A beautiful book for scholars and for readers of James Wright’s amazing poems. 
–Lori Jakiela, author of Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth Maybe and more

Adam Scheffler has written a wonder of a book. Rich with insights as crystalline and piercing as those that emerge from Wright's own poems, So This Is What It Feels Like, not only offers distinctly new ways to read some of the most-anthologized work in Wright's oeuvre, but also engagingly and convincingly considers many lesser-known pieces, showing how their politics, sincerity, style, and emotionality might revitalize the way we read this enduring American poet. Carefully attuned to lyric and linguistic nuance, Midwestern social history, and Wright's own biography, So This Is What It Feels Like is a major contribution to our understanding of Wright's life and writing.
–Michael Prior, poet and Associate Professor of English, Macalaster College

Both devoted and new readers of Wright will delight in Scheffler’s superb and engaging exploration of the “tectonic” and “reforming” emotion in the poet’s work, in which empathy is not sentimentality, it is a “persistent openness to transgression and change.” Scheffler skillfully guides us through Wright’s “dynamic” encounters with the Ohioans of Martin’s Ferry: poems whose “raw, painful” empathy is an act of imagination and where alienation shifts into a “vital, quickening, momentary fullness.” Scheffler, a brilliant poet himself, grants Wright’s familiar poems with vitality and lesser-known poems with clarity.
–Camille Guthrie, poet and Director of Undergraduate Writing at Bennington College

 

Working from the claim that empathy is a dynamic force energizing and guiding James Wright’s venture, Adam Scheffler carefully reveals Wright as a poet whose work remains relevant because of its unique way of bearing witness to people and environments, including the working class, Appalachian community of Martins Ferry, Ohio into which he was born.
–David Swerdlow, Professor of English, Westminster College