“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.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“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.”
—The Washington Post
“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.”
—New York Review of Books
“How Long includes everything—humor and resentment, anger and ardor, pettiness and astonishment.”
—The Yale Review
“Padgett’s genius is to follow his thought no matter where it leads him. He is less concerned with making an old-fashioned shapely poem than he is with the movement of a shapely mind, and in that regard he joins ranks with other poets who have broken new ground.”
—Bill Zavatsky
“A Padgett book is always a delight. The humor and wry wisdom that shows up in Ron Padgett poems is forever quirky, often also full of feeling, and nearly always clearly to the point.”
—Galatea Resurrects
“Padgett’s poetry drifts from one thought to the next, then circles back on itself, cartwheeling through stanzas and parading through lines, often good-humored even as he discusses the most solemn of adult subjects, death.”
—Gently Read Literature
