Ron Padgett's title poem asks: "How long do you want to go on being the person you think you are? / How Long, a city in China." With the arrival of his first grandchild, Padgett becomes even more inspired to confront the eternal mysteries in poems with a wry, rueful honesty that comes only with experience, in his case sixty-eight years of it.

I never thought,
forty years ago,
taping my poems into a notebook,
that one day the tape
would turn yellow, grow brittle, and fall off
and that I'd find myself on hands and knees
groaning as I picked the pieces up
off the floor
one by one

Ron Padgett is a celebrated translator, memoirist, and "a thoroughly American poet, coming sideways out of Whitman, Williams, and New York Pop with a Tulsa twist" (Peter Gizzi). His poetry has been translated into more than a dozen languages and has appeared in The Best American Poetry, The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry, The Oxford Book of American Poetry, and on Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac. He was also a guest on Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion in 2009. Padgett is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and his most recent books include How to Be Perfect; You Never Know, Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard; and If I Were You. Born in Oklahoma, he lives in New York City and Calais, Vermont.

“Ron Padgett makes the most quiet and sensible of feelings a provocatively persistent wonder.”—Robert Creeley

Ron Padgett has reenergized modern poetry with exuberant and tender love poems, with exceptionally lucid and touching elegies, and with imaginative and action-packed homages to American culture and visual art. He has paid tribute to Woody Woodpecker and the West, to friends and collaborators, to language and cowslips, to beautiful women and chocolate milk, to paintings and small-time criminals. His poems have always imparted a contagious sense of joy.

In these new poems, Padgett hasn’t forsaken his beloved Woody Woodpecker, but he has decided to heed the canary and sound the alarm. Here, he asks, “What makes us so mean?” And he really wants to know. Even as these poems cajole and question, as they call attention to what has been lost and what we still stand to lose, they continue to champion what makes sense and what has always been worth saving. “Humanity,” Padgett generously (and gently) reminds us, still “has to take it one step at a time.”

Ron Padgett is a celebrated translator, memoirist, teacher, and, as Peter Gizzi says, “a thoroughly American poet, coming sideways out of Whitman, Williams, and New York Pop with a Tulsa twist.” His poetry has been translated into more than a dozen languages and has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Poetry 180, The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry, The Oxford Book of American Poetry, and on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. Visit his website at www.ronpadgett.com.

Wayne Padgett was a colorful, charming, and generous man. He was also one of Oklahoma’s most elusive bootleggers and career criminals. From the 1960s into the 1980s, he operated out of Tulsa as a high-ranking member of the outfit known as the Dixie Mafia. In Oklahoma Tough, poet Ron Padgett tells the inside story of his notorious father and of how he earned his reputation as a Robin Hood “King of the Bootleggers.”

Oklahoma Tough is also a history of the distinctive mid-twentieth-century Oklahoma milieu that made Wayne Padgett’s life story possible. Ron Padgett brings this vanished world to life with candid and sometimes comic descriptions of criminal life. Particularly insightful and entertaining are interviews in which former bootleggers, family members, friends, and enemies speak openly about their lives.