Poetry by Ron Padgett
September 1, 2007 • 6 x 9 • 128 pages • 978-1-56689-203-2
Required reading for humans.
Ron Padgett has reenergized modern poetry with exuberant and tender love poems, exceptionally lucid and touching elegies, and imaginative and action-packed homages to American culture and visual art. From the playful to the profound and from the practical to the political, How to Be Perfect tells us more about how to live well than a library full of self-help books.
About the Author
Ron Padgett grew up in Tulsa and has lived mostly in New York City since 1960. Among his many honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters poetry award, the Shelley Memorial Award, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. Padgett’s How Long was Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry and his Collected Poems won the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Los Angeles Times prize for the best poetry book of 2013. In addition to being a poet, he is also the translator of Guillaume Apollinaire, Pierre Reverdy, and Blaise Cendrars. His own work has been translated into eighteen languages.