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How to Be Perfect
Reviews
Ann Arbor Observer:
“No one has contributed more to sustain the liveliness of [New York School] writing than Ron Padgett.”
The Daily Cardinal:
“Padgett has always articulated something other poets have not: the intensity of pleasure and sorrow in the everyday life.”
Entertainment Weekly:
“Padgett’s deceptively light poems muse on everyday items (English muffins; a toothbrush) exploring our desires and insecurities. A few rare long poems on major themes (war; how to be perfect) demonstrate Padgett’s ambition.”
Idiolexicon:
“A book of wonderment.”
Isola di Rifiuti:
“Highly refreshing.”
Longhouse Publishers & Booksellers:
“A beauty.”
Minneapolis City Pages:
“Spans the gamut of human emotions and contemplation, as good poetry should.”
Minnesota Daily:
“[Padgett’s] poems have a distinct conversational tone that is on one level wholly relatable and on another wholly profound.”
Minneapolis Observer Quarterly:
“An entertaining collection of advice, truisms, and nonsense.”
New Yorker:
“Observational, reminiscent, and prescriptive . . . Padgett’s cockeyed humor is ultimately optimistic, finding reason for continued hope.”
News from the Academy of American Poets:
Academy Chancellor James Tate on the Election of Ron Padgett to the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets
“Ron Padgett’s poems sing with absolutely true pitch. And they are human friendly. Their search for truths, both small and large, can be cause for laughter, or at least a thoughtful sigh.”
Poetry Project Newsletter:
“[Padgett] is never less than the perfect poet.”
Possum Ego:
“Pathos and hilarity . . . Tulsa-wisdom, Euro-American vision.”
Small Press Review:
“How to Be Perfect [is] . . . written in an engaging literary real-time that so closely approximates human thought that you find yourself totally caught up in Padgett’s reveries before you even have a chance to realize how fast reality has been left behind. . . . Padgett, despite his quieter tone and tempered sagacity, still occupies his position at the head of the pack.”
St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
“Padgett’s signature humor shines.”
Top Ten Poetry Books of 2007
Third Factory:
“Substantial—maybe our only genuinely philosophical poet—and as light and invigorating as the airiest morning air.”
World Literature Today:
“Confirm[s] Ron Padgett’s accomplishment as a poet at home in both the comedy and the pathos of imagination.”
Billy Collins:
“How to Be Perfect should remind us of how long Ron Padgett has managed to stay perfectly balanced on a tightrope of irony despite his verbal giddiness and the uproariousness of his imagination.”
Robert Hass:
“I have been thinking about how to ‘provide prepublication copy’ for a book of poems by Ron Padgett, as if written by Ron Padgett who would never, of course, blurb his own books as Walt Whitman, another New York poet, did. It would probably go like this: ‘You should read Ron Padgett. He is a very good poet. You don’t have a better thing to do with your time. What is time? Why are you wasting your life? Read Ron Padgett.’ Only if Ron Padgett wrote this, it would be funnier, more graceful, light as air and as wiry and hard as, well, wire.”
Lyn Hejinian:
“Ron Padgett’s How to Be Perfect is. Perfect. It’s a magician’s manual, or perhaps his memoir of a life, perfectly pulled out. The poems seem charmed; they are definitely charming. They are full of allure and as amazing as experience itself, which can be as funny as a happy green rabbit hopping out of a hat, which, on further consideration, can also be a little bit sad. And these poems warrant further and further consideration. Each one is a gift, and like a gift each means more than it says. Indeed, these poems mean a lot. They are the work of a magician who has learned his tricks from the goodness of life.”
Matthew Rohrer:
“Ron Padgett has always been a great poet and How to Be Perfect continues his long tradition of making people happy. In this new book Ron Padgett does what he’s done better than anyone else for decades—he makes serious art that’s funny.”
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