Poetry by Ron Padgett

November 1, 2022 • 6 x 9 • 120 pages • 978-1-56689-655-9

In this new poetry collection, Pulitzer Prize finalist Ron Padgett illuminates the wonders inside things that don’t even exist—and then they do.

In Dot, Ron Padgett returns with more of the playfully profound work that has endeared him to generations of readers. Guided by curiosity and built on wit, generosity of spirit, and lucid observation, Dot shows how any experience, no matter how mundane, can lead to a poem that flares like gentle fireworks in the night sky of the reader’s mind.

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 (PSA). He has also received the Shelley Memorial Award and the Frost medal from the PSA. 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 Dot

“A breezy and nostalgic collection reflecting on the quotidian and the momentous. . . . Padgett remains charmingly whimsical, and the more heartfelt entries are a testament to his status as one of the great living American poets.” —Publishers Weekly

“A refreshing read for its wisdom and levity, or perhaps for the wisdom in its levity. . . . Padgett’s loose associations feel both delightfully surprising and completely natural.” —Sarah Barch, The Arkansas International

“Though the work is comforting, it’s an ode, not a lullaby—this read is a page turner. The real magic of the collection stems from its ability to fully immerse the reader in a fantastical yet familiar world. . . . A fulfilling and immersive experience from cover to cover and somehow still manages to leave readers wanting more.” —Aiden J. Bowers, The Harvard Crimson

Praise for Ron Padgett

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

“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

“These poems mingle the nervy sophistication and cosmopolitan experimentalism of a thriving international avant-garde art tradition with a kind of hillbilly twang that’s unmistakably American.” —Tom Clark, San Francisco Chronicle

“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

“The poet makes superlative use of the directive writing consciousness—often automatic pilot—to tap the unconscious for memory, vision, emotion, and the unexpected and indefinable. The poems speak backwards and forwards in time, to self, to family and friends, to poetic technique, to the birds caged in the chest. It is so lovely.” —Alice Notley

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

“The Ron Padgett of yore is still with us—as charming, unpretentious, and surprising as ever—but there is a new Ron Padgett in this book as well: a poet of heartbreaking tenderness and ever-deepening wisdom.” —Paul Auster

“Ron Padgett’s poems sing with absolutely true pitch . . . agile and lucid and glad to be alive.” —James Tate

“Always discovering new pleasures and reviving old ones, full of what, in Frank O’Hara’s phrase, ‘still makes a poem a surprise,’ Ron Padgett’s poems, among those of our times, are in the small company of authentic works of art.” —Kenneth Koch

“Ron Padgett has that ‘Lubitsch touch’—a whimsical grace that is full of wisdom and self-possession complete with mother-wit and, in his case, American invention.” —Peter Gizzi