From the award-winning poet, dark comic microbursts of prose deliver a whole childhood, at the hands of an aspiring middle-class Jewish family whose hard-boiled American values and wit were the forge of a poet's coming-of-age. 'My grandparents taught me to write my sins on paper and cast them into the water. . . . They didn't expect an entire book,' Hirsch says in the 'prologue' to this glorious festival of knife-sharp observations. In microchapters--sometimes only a single scathing sentence long--with titles like 'Call to Breakfast,' 'Pay Cash,' 'The Sorrow of Manly Sports,' and 'Aristotle on Lawrence Avenue,' Eddie's gambling father, Ruby, son of an iron smelter, schools him and his sister in blackjack; Eddie's mom bangs pots to wake the kids to a breakfast of cold cereal; Uncle Bob, in the collection business, is heard threatening people on the phone; and nobody suffers fools. In this household, Eddie learned to jab with his left and cross with his right, never to kid a kidder, and