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.

Ruth Stone has earned many honors for her poetry, including the National Book Award.

A collection of sardonic, crafty poems questions the role of convention in everyday life.

Ordinary Words is the luminous, wild, and lyrical collection of poetry that brought Ruth Stone the critical acclaim she long deserved with the National Book Critics Circle Award, and it paved the way to the National Book Award and long-deserved critical attention. Ordinary Words captures a unique vision of Americana, marked by Stone's characteristic wit, poignancy, and lyricism. The poet addresses the environment, poverty, and aging with fearless candor and surprising humor. Sister poet to Nobel Prize-winner Wislawa Syzmborska, Ruth Stone offers a view of her country and its citizens that is tender humorous, and filled with hard political truths as well as love, beauty, cruelty, and sorrow. Ruth Stone is a poet of the people, and poet's poet. Ordinary Words shows that poetry is about everyday life, our life. Poems are set in Rutland, Vermont; Indianapolis; Chattanooga; Houston; Boise; and Troy, New York (where celluloid collars were made). Stone's subjects are trailer parks, state parks, prefab houses, school crossing guards, bears, snakes, hummingbirds, bottled water, Aunt Maud, Uncle Cal, lost love, dry humping at the Greyhound bus terminal, and McDonalds as a refuge from loneliness. Her heroes are dead husbands, wild grandmothers, struggling daughters: ordinary Americans leading simple and extraordinary lives.

A finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. “Ruth Stone is . . . a pre-eminent American poet.” —Harvard Review

Second-hand coat -- Where I came from -- At the center -- Poetry -- How to catch Aunt Harriette -- Scars -- What can you do? -- Drought in the lower fields -- Moving right along -- Pokeberries -- Mother's picture -- Liebeslied -- Curtains -- Something -- From the arboretum -- Winter -- Shadows -- The miracle -- You may ask -- Names -- Why kid yourself -- Message from your toes -- Sunday -- Pine cones -- Father's day -- Orange poem praising brown -- The room -- American milk -- How Aunt Maud took to being a woman -- Comments of the mild -- An academic life -- Procedure -- When the furnace toes on in a California tract house -- Icons from Indianapolis -- Snow trivia -- The latest hotel guest walks over particles that revolve in seven other dimentsions controlling latticed space -- Years later -- Surviving in Earlysville with a broken window -- Turning -- Happiness -- Turn your eyes away -- Body among trees -- Some things you'll need to know before you join the union -- Women laughing -- Translations -- A last cloud -- Ceam -- Codicle -- Loss -- From the other side -- The tree -- Habit -- Illinois -- Fading -- U of my -- Drams of wild birds -- Vegetables I -- Vegetables II -- Periphery -- Separate -- Overlapping Edges -- Communion -- And yet -- Being a woman -- Cocks and mares -- Shotgun wedding -- Family -- Mine -- The infant -- Laguna beach -- Out of Lost Angeles -- The nost -- Bazook -- Something deeper -- The song of Absinthe granny -- Dream of light in the shade -- The talking fish -- Memory of knowledge and death at the mother of scholars -- Being human -- Tenacity -- The excuse -- Salt -- Denouement -- Between th elines -- The plan -- Poles -- Emily -- Green apples -- Haying -- Habitat -- Eclat -- The principle of mirrors -- behind the facade -- I have three daughters -- A mother looks at her child -- Advice -- End of summer -- Seat belt fastened? -- Disappeared child -- The sotry of the churn -- It -- Metamorphosis -- Topography -- The magnet -- In an iridescent time -- The season -- The burned bridge -- Orchard -- The splinter -- The mold -- An old song -- Love's relative -- Vernal Equinox.

"The story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, the eccentric and remote sister of their dead mother. The family house is in the small town of Fingerbone on a glacial lake in the Far West, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town "chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere." Ruth and Lucille's struggle toward adulthood beautifully illuminates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transience."--