Poetry. Ron Padgett has a gift for making poetry that is simultaneously funny and artful. He lays down lines that start as giggles, grow to hearty chuckles, and then give way to wispy thoughts of strange significance. "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. I wish he would loan me his sunglasses for a day or two so I could check out the amazing world according to Padgett" -- Billy Collins.

Zone is the fruit of poet-translator Ron Padgett's fifty-year engagement with the work of France's greatest modern poet. This bilingual edition of Apollinaire's poetry represents the full range of his achievement from traditional lyric verse to the pathbreaking visual poems he called calligrams, from often-anthologized classics to hitherto-untranslated gems, from poems of cosmic breadth to a poem about his shoes. Including an introduction by the distinguished scholar Peter Read, helpful endnotes, a preface, and an annotated bibliography by Padgett, this new edition of Apollinaire...