by Ruth Stone
Winner of the Pushcart Prize
"Stone's work is alternately witty, bawdy, touching, and profound. But never pompous. Her honesty and originality give her writing a sense of youth and newness because she looks at the world so clearly, without all the detritus of social convention the rest of us pick up along the way…. Her writing proves her to be simply inspired."
— USA Today
"Simplicity, Ruth Stone's tenth book, is deceptive in title and appearance — its cool blue cover — since it is a wild, wide book haunted by what William James calls the 'buzzing, blooming' of life, and all its ghosts; the voice of neighbors and highways, photons, fields of corn (I ear what you say). Sperm and egg converse, as does a dead husband...She has a wicked sense of humor, about poetry: 'A bulletin from the poetry factory says/we like our images stuck on with mortician's was' and about people, herself included…. There is also great beauty in this collection, and a brilliance of imagery that comes from seeing the world freshly and clearly: '…. An empty parking lot/passive as the hide of a sleeping amoeba,' 'a June flush of leaves and wild mustard.' Above all, Stone's poetry speaks about and on behalf of love, which marries particles, photons, neutrons, the smallest particles alive, moving and connected. 'Love also takes its shape/from climate,/the workhorse of the world;/and yet, so delicate….'"
— The Boston Globe
Listen to Ruth Stone Reading from Ordinary Words and Simplicity
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