Very Collected Poems [Paperback]

Over sixty years of poems celebrating one of the most dynamic careers in twentieth and twenty-first century American poetry.

Gathering a lifetime of poetry, Ron Padgett’sVery Collected Poemsis the ultimate record of the Pulitzer Prize finalist’s oeuvre—newly updated since the sold-out first edition of 2013. Padgett’s poems reverberate with his love of poetry, his musings on artists and musicians from Andrew Marvell to Woody Guthrie to his personal friendships with Kenneth Koch and Joe Brainard, alongside his poems involving family and the magic of just being alive. By turns imaginative and witty, and then simple and direct, Padgett’s mercurial work offers readers the pleasure of his surprising curiosity and generous spirit.USRon Padgett’sHow Longwas a Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry, and hisCollected Poemswon theLA TimesPrize for the best poetry book of 2014 and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. He has also received the Shelley Memorial Award and the Frost medal from the Poetry Society of America. His translations includeZone: Selected Poems of Guillaume Apollinaireand Blaise Cendrars’sComplete Poems. Seven of his poems were used in Jim Jarmusch’s filmPaterson. New York City has been his home base since 1960.Praise for Ron Padgett

“Ron Padgett makes the most quiet and sensible of feelings a provocatively persistent wonder.”—Robert Creeley

“For decades now, Ron Padgett has built up a body of work that, like the tenderly deadpan ballads of Jonathan Richman, has at its heart a sort of wry, pickled innocence. . . . The charm of his lines—and their power, because his work has a way of disarming you and pulling you in again and again—often comes from his allergy to anything pretentious or even ‘poetic.’ He makes plain niceness look like the most radiclCt