Jessica Greenbaum is the winner of a Discovery/The Nation prize and P.E.N.'s New Writer award. Her poems, criticism, and personal essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Partisan Review, Southwest Review, The Nation, Boulevard, Press, and elsewhere.

About Inventing Difficulty:

"A sinewy, vividly intelligent humanity gives to this collection its memorable voice. In one sense, Jessica Greenbaum's poems are incisively local — that Brooklyn landscape out of Whitman and Hart Crane. In another sense, however, they tell of the larger sadness and recognitions of our century. They 'design their world through love' and scrupulous observation. A first book by a poet very much to be listened to."
—George Steiner

"In a world both rich in close affectations and awash in agonies we know only by rumor or report, Greenbaum writes her best self — eager, playful, responsible, beautiful. We need these poems, that show such power."
—Marie Ponsot

"These are tough, passionate poems that spring from an urgency both intellectual and primal. They are wry, hilarious and wacky at times, heartbreakingly sad at others. Jessica Greenbaum brings a sparkling imagination and a vital, divine impatience to American poetry. How we need her, right about now!"
—Phillip Lopate

"I have known and admired Jessica Greenbaum's work for many years. It keeps getting better — also harder to describe, in its entrancing blend of the hard-edged and lyrical, the chatty and tragic, the passionate and wry. Greenbaum is mistress of a recognizably urban but also piercingly individual style. Her poetry is full of brilliant phrases but it also respects ambivalance and loss, the silences between people and things, the heartache inhering in the most loving family. Inventing Difficulty is a welcome debut volume by a wonderful poet."
—Rachel Hadas