“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
