Poetry. In this, her eighth collection of poems, Stone writes with a crackling intelligence from the vantage point of an aging and impoverished woman. Wise, sardonic, crafty, and misleadingly simple, Stone loves heavy themes but not heavy poems. She brings to her poems a passion for knowing how the world works, whether through science, politics, the erotic, or history. "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.

Author City: Goshen, VT USA

Ruth Stone (born June 8, 1915, in Roanoke, Virginia) is an American poet. She is the author of thirteen books of poetry. She is the recipient of many awards and honors. In 1959, after her husband committed suicide, she was forced to raise three daughters alone. (As she has pointed out, her poems are "love poems, all written to a dead man" who forced her to "reside in limbo" with her daughters.) For twenty years she traveled the US, teaching creative writing at many universities, including the University of Illinois, University of Wisconsin, Indiana University, University of California Davis, Brandeis, and finally settling at State University of New York Binghamton. Today, Stone lives in Vermont.