[close] This is the definitive selection of work by one of the wittiest, most inventive poets currently writing. Ron Padgett, author of Great Balls of Fire, Triangles in the Afternoon, and other highly acclaimed books, stands alongside his fellow New York School associates John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler as a major voice of American modernism. His work runs the gamut from popular humor to intellectual elegance to wild richochets of the imagination. The heady circumvolutions of his poems are nevertheless surprising and frequently breathtaking in their ability to blend comedy and pathos in a graceful, mercurial lyricism. [close]