Making Love to Roget’s Wife

About

In plain, unpretentious language, with brutal honesty, Ron Koertge can meld violence, love, human ugliness, joy, and modern depravity into a short lyric that makes us laugh out loud or socks us in the gut. His images arrive in giant clown shoes—cigars the size of Florida, the plastic man’s counter-length arms—or neatly packaged in carefully observed detail, as he writes of the “black little hearts” of ants or an ape’s “dark and leathery breast.”

Through every poem, there runs a constant and sincere humanity, a voice that laughs at itself, often goads us a bit, but always stuns and enlightens us when we dis – cover something of ourselves gambling with the crowd at the racetrack, driving from the parking lot of the Mexican restaurant, or shambling with the distraught parent leaving the hospital.

In Making Love to Roget’s Wife, Ron Koertge offers his best work from twenty-three years and a dozen earlier collections. With twenty-five new poems, and over eighty from previous books, this selection reawakens us to the presence of a superbly honed comic voice.

Author

Ron Koertge is a professor of English at Pasadena City College in Pasadena, California, and lives in South Pasadena. He is the winner of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council.

Praise

“Ron Koertge is not only the wisest, most entertaining wiseguy in American poetry. He is also a conjurer, a designer of verbal holograms. Step inside any of these poems and you enter the precinct of a uniquely playful imagination.”
—Billy Collins

“These poems run off the tracks, and yet somehow make tremendous sense. They are not only the most charming poems in the world, but great fun. There is something holy about a poet who wants to give his readers nothing but pleasure. He throws such magic dust in the eyes that I swear Ron Koertge is my favorite poet. I couldn’t be a bigger fan.”
—Edward Field