Books by Ruth Stone
What Love Comes To: New and Selected Poems
by Ruth Stone
“We may pull down the shades in order to get on with things, but [Ruth] Stone pulls them up to remind us that the real stuff of life isn’t about to disappear.” —The New York Times Book Review
"In a field in which collections of selected writings are constantly being released, this book stands out because Stone shows that simplicity can be a deceiving doorway into some of the most challenging poems written by an American poet. Stone's poems blend the personal with dimensions of the larger world in a manner reminiscent of the late William Stafford. Few poets have this gift for taking the workings of ordinary life and fusing them with a poetic process that sustains intense emotion, allowing human experience to be felt through the mysteries of language.... Ruth Stone belongs to every generation of poets who have taken the responsibility to give back to the world." —The Bloomsbury Review
"This volume rightly secures (Stone's) status as a sui generis treasure who has survived poverty, a lack of formal education, profound personal tragedy, and decades of obscurity to emerge as a pre-eminent American poet who is still writing vital poems at the age of ninety-three." —Harvard Review
What Love Comes To, a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, gathers nearly half a century of poems from a National Book Award-winning poet who, over the course of her career, has written in a wide range of voices and forms. Drawing from eleven previous volumes, this collection offers a trajectory through that career, presenting Ruth Stone from her early formal lyrics, through fierce feminist and political poems, to her most recent meditations on blindness and aging. Stone, at age ninety-two, returns often to the theme of loss in her work, all the while maintaining what the Vermont poet laureate nominations committee calls “a sense of survival surpassing poverty and grief. . . . Her poetry’s irrepressible humor and intellectual curiosity are unique among contemporary American poets.”
What Love Comes To is the perfect entry point into Stone’s world of serious laughter; of uncertainty and insight; of mystery and acceptance.
When I forget to weep,
I hear the peeping tree toads
creeping up the bark.
Love lies asleep
and dreams that everything
is in its golden net;
and I am caught there, too,
when I forget.
A recipient of the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Ruth Stone has taught at numerous American universities. The author of eleven books of poetry, she has lived in Vermont since 1957.
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What Love Comes To: New & Selected Poems
by Ruth Stone
"A collection of poems that give rich drama to ordinary experience, deepening our sense of what it means to be human."Pulitzer Prize finalist citation
"There is a broad, powerful streak of independenceeven disobediencethat runs through Stone's writing and has inspired a great number of women after her."Guardian
Finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize, this retrospective of Ruth Stone's poetry combines the best work from twelve previous volumes with an abundance of new poems. This comprehensive selection includes early formal lyrics, fierce political poems, and meditations on her husband's suicide and her own blindness. As Sharon Olds says in her foreword, "A Ruth Stone poem feels alive in the handsardent, independent, restless." What Love Comes To is a necessary collection from an American original.
Can it be that
memory is useless,
like a torn web
hanging in the wind?
Sometimes it billows
out, a full high gauze
like a canopy.
But the air passes
through the rents
and it falls again and flaps
shapeless
like the ghost rag that it is
hanging at the window
of an empty room.
Ruth Stone is the author of twelve books of poetry. Among her many awards are the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Eric Mathieu King Award, a Whiting Award, and she was a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. She taught creative writing at many universities, finally settling at SUNY Binghamton. She lives in Vermont.
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In the Dark
by Mark Billingham, Gita Wolf, Sirish Rao, Kate Hoefler, Ruth Stone
Product Description Five men are out walking on a moonless night, when suddenly they bump into something. Each of them sees something different, yet each is convinced that he is right. How is that possible? And what could this thing be? This modern retelling of an old Sufi tale is a story/fable of wisdom of all ages.Calligraphed and printed in the style of traditional woodcuts, this book is every collector's dream."This small, square book is a handcrafted treasure . . . The pictures and the short calligraphic text, written on handmade paper, and the small bag in which the book is sold make it a special treat for children and book collectors alike."-White Ravens Catalogue of the World's Best BooksRathna Ramanathan is one of India's most sought-after graphic designers. About the Author Gita Wolf has written more than seventeen books for children and adults. A highly original and creative voice in contemporary Indian publishing, she has pursued her interest in exploring and experimenting with the form of the book and its status as a revered cultural object. Many of her children's books have won major international awards.
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In the Dark
by Mark Billingham, Gita Wolf, Sirish Rao, Kate Hoefler, Ruth Stone
When asked whether poets improve with age Ruth Stone, 89, replied: “There’s no question. If your brain goes on and on, as it should under normal conditions, there’s more in it and your writing will get more profound.”
Year after year, Ruth Stone’s poems turn ever more penetrating. Fresh from her National Book Award, this prophetic new book is filled with winter, fractals, and passionate aging:
From “What is a Poem?”:
Having come this far
with a handful of alphabet,
I am forced,
with these few blocks,
to invent the universe.
Science, politics, art, and fellow small-town citizens all play pivotal roles in her poems. From the cilia in the ear of an owl to cheap paint peeling off the walls, Ruth Stone presents a world dissected and revealed:
From “The Driveway”:
Asphalt is a kind of urban lava flow
that creeps from plot to plot along a street;
affluent, weedless, slow, and cancerous;
pressure from the magma populace
for easy maintenance; neat status-symbolic,
easy to wash with the garden hose.
“Her poems startle us over and over,” Galway Kinnell said when presenting Stone the Wallace Stevens Award, “with their shapeliness, their humor, their youthfulness, their wild aptness . . . the moral gulps they prompt, their fierce exactness of language and memory.”
Ruth Stone is the author of nine books of poetry. She is the recipient of the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, a Whiting Award (with which she bought plumbing for her house) and two Guggenheim Fellowships (one of which roofed her house). After her husband committed suicide, she was forced to raise three daughters alone. For twenty years she taught creative writing at many universities, finally settling at Binghamton University. Today, Ruth Stone lives in Vermont.
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In the Dark
by Mark Billingham, Gita Wolf, Sirish Rao, Kate Hoefler, Ruth Stone
“A stand-out thriller….[A] remarkable achievement.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
Hailed as one of the UK's strongest contemporary thriller writers—the British Dennis Lehane—Mark Billingham may be the most exciting author to hit the noir fiction scene in years. With In the Dark, Billingham steps briefly away from his bestselling series featuring Detective Inspector Tom Thorne (Sleepyhead, Scaredy Cat, Lazybones, et al) and delivers a powerful story of cops, street gangs, and career criminals that twists and turns into dark, unexpected areas. In the Dark is a magnificent achievement by a modern master who’s been compared enthusiastically to Michael Connelly, Ian Rankin, and George Pellacanos, and whose latest novel, Death Message, has recently been named the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year.
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In the Dark
by Mark Billingham, Gita Wolf, Sirish Rao, Kate Hoefler, Ruth Stone
With striking illustrations that will make your soul fly and spare text that will make your heart dance, this lyrical picturebook encourages us to set aside our snap judgements and quiet our fears of the unknown by shining light on what has been kept in the dark.
They came in the dark,
and took the narrow path
that only witches used.
Everyone said that’s what they were . . .
But what if everyone was wrong? Watch what happens when one girl steps into the woods and gets to know these newcomers. The spooky black cat? Meet Mingus! The broomsticks and cloaks? Cloth and wooden handles. And those shadows in the sky? Handmade kites, fluttering in the breeze.
When the breeze becomes a blustery storm, everything changes...including first impressions.
Told from two perspectives, here is a gentle and timely reminder that all it takes to bridge the gap of misunderstanding and fear between people is an open and willing heart.
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In the Dark
by Mark Billingham, Gita Wolf, Sirish Rao, Kate Hoefler, Ruth Stone
“An aging poet’s failing eyesight informs this collection . . . some of which recall the spirit of Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. Dark but not hopeless, they spring from Stone’s lucid inner vision, which is straightforward, musical, and defiant.”—Utne
Now available in paperback, In the Dark, winner of the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement, is Ruth Stone’s follow-up to her National Book Award--winning In the Next Galaxy. Personal issues of memory, aging, and loss are balanced against profound political and cultural change. Stone has been called a “people’s poet” whose work is “profoundly rewarding,” and she writes a poetry of everyday life that recasts the mundane as indispensable. When asked whether poets improve with age, Stone, then eighty-nine, replied: “There’s no question.”
From “What is a Poem?”:
Having come this far
with a handful of alphabet,
I am forced,
with these few blocks,
to invent the universe.
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In the Next Galaxy
by Ruth Stone
“Her poems startle us over and over with their shapeliness, their humor, their youthfulness, their wild aptness, their strangeness, their sudden familiarity, the authority of their insights, the moral gulps they prompt, their fierce exactness of language and memory.”—Galway Kinnell on presenting the Wallace Stevens Award
“In the Next Galaxy gives us the unflinching vision of a woman well into her ’80s, fully inhabiting body and mind.”—National Book Award Judges’ statement
“Compassionate, comic, feminist and horrified by injustice, Stone’s poems are composed with an accessible deftness.”—The Oregonian
Ruth Stone has earned nearly every major literary award for her poetry. She taught at many universities, finally settling at SUNY Binghamton. Today she lives in Vermont.
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Essential Ruth Stone
by Ruth Stone
Expertly and sensitively selected by her granddaughter Bianca, The Essential Ruth Stone bears witness to a vivid fifty-year career of one of America’s most influential and pioneering poets. Distilling twelve books into a single volume―from the wild formalism of her early work to the science-filled cosmic intellect of her final collection―The Essential Ruth Stone shows a visionary poet with a physical grasp on language. Dazzling, humorous and grief-stricken poems explore the continuity of loss and love, in the spectral appearances of the dead husband, to portraits of an American childhood, life during wartime, and complex metaphysical inquiries into consciousness itself. Ruth Stone’s feminism, mysticism and overall fierceness shine through her wit and passion. Moving gracefully between the loneliness of grief and loss to the fullness of life and love, Stone approaches all her subjects with a profound humanity, an understanding born from her own lived experiences.
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