Very Collected Poems

Poems by Ron Padgett

November 18, 2025 • 6 x 9 • 1128 pages • 9781566897433

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’s Very Collected Poems is the ultimate record of the Pulitzer Prize finalist’s oeuvre—newly updated and completed since the sold-out first edition hit shelves in 2013. Padgett’s poems reverberate with his reading and friendships, from Andrew Marvell to Woody Guthrie to Kenneth Koch, alongside his musings on art and family. Wry, insightful, and direct, they offer readers the rewards of his endless curiosity and generous spirit.

About the Author

Ron Padgett’s How Long was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry, and his Collected Poems won the LA Times Prize 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 include Zone: Selected Poems of Guillaume Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars’s Complete Poems. Seven of his poems were used in Jim Jarmusch’s film Paterson. 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

“Reading Padgett one realizes that playfulness and lightness of touch are not at odds with seriousness. As is often the case, leave it to the comic writer to best convey our tragic predicament.” —Charles Simic, The New York Review of Books

“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 radical stance of all.” —Jeff Gordiner, The New York Times

“Padgett’s plainspoken, wry poems deliver their wisdom through a kind of connoisseurship of absurdity.” —The New Yorker

“Deeply pleasing to read.” —The Paris Review

“I can think of no other poet I’ve read over the past 40 years who embodies Williams’s spirit and his great heart’s aesthetic. . . . I’m willing to put money on Padgett, in two or three generations (it takes that long) to be counted among the best poets of his generation, to be counted among the best American poets, period.” —Thomas Lux, Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award

“Forty-five years after Great Balls of Fire, Padgett’s poems still fuel our capacity for joyful incomprehensibility and subsequent mobility of thought.” —Poetry

“Padgett’s poems are so playful, self-mocking and eager to please that it would be easy to overlook their craft, not to mention the depth and sincerity of the emotions they convey. What animates [his work] is the tension between the buoyancy of its language and the gravity of its subject.” —The Washington Post

“Every page is a good time. . . . Sweet, hilarious, moving and mind-bogglingly imaginative. This book is for anyone who likes writing or who thinks it’s interesting to have a mind (or simply a forehead).” —Richard Hell, The Wall Street Journal

“A twentieth-century Great who is still producing superlative verse today. . . . And that’s exactly what Padgett is: a virtuoso.” —Seth Abramson, Huffington Post

“Padgett’s sense of romantic joy is undiminished, as is his thoughtfulness about language and the ways in which time changes meaning, and sense can morph into eloquent absurdity.” —Ken Tucker, Entertainment Weekly

“Wonderful, generous, funny poetry.” —John Ashbery