Collected Poems of Marie Ponsot [Paperback]

Now in paperback, the stunning lifework of this beloved prize-winning poet, gathered in one volume, covering sixty years of poetry, from 1956 to 2016.

This celebratory volume covers nearly all of Marie Ponsot's published work, fromTrue Minds(published in 1956 as number five in the famous Pocket Poets series from City Lights press) throughEasy(2009),her most recent collection; and it also includes some work written in the years since. Here is the lyrical joy, the full range of Ponsot's gift for constructing the pleasures and pains of a riddle that the music and wit of her language solve just in the nick of time, in the hand-span skill that is the poem. Notable in this collection is the astonishing accomplishment of Ponsot's sonnets: the traditional form in varieties we've never seen in one book before. Open these pages anywhere to experience language as the primitive dialect of our human race, as she has described it--to gratefully enter a state that is what poetry hopes of us and for us: enraptured attention. “A treasure trove . . . Ponsot is masterful with received forms—there are sonnets, sestinas and villanelles that are nothing short of gymnastic in their execution.” —Craig Morgan Teicher,Los Angeles Times

Sixty years of wondrous verse from this award-winning but curiously underappreciated poet. Open to any page and you'll stumble on lines you'll never forget: 'The meanest mistake / has a point to make.' —Dotun Akintoye,Oprah.com

Cements her reputation as a major American poet. —Publishers Weekly(starred review)

We read such poets because we want to know how a poetic intelligence inhabits the world—or invents it. —William Logan,The New York Times Book Review

[Ponsot] holds the world to be good, to be glorious, and her poems help us attend to the miracle of consciousness and the startling nature of sensory experlÓ+