How to Be Perfect

1. Finished books will be available for Book Sense Advance Access and review copy mailings in June, which will help us secure media and bookseller interest in advance of publication. 2. Additional marketing will include wholesaler advertising and Poetry Daily online sponsorship. Publicity efforts will include a large, pre-publication finished copy mailing focusing on radio producers, national newspapers and magazines, and poetry and academic journals. 3. A print interview about this book with Ron Padgett and Internet radio producer Amy King has already appeared online.

Required reading for humans.

“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 this new collection of 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.”