Ron Slate is the author of the poetry collections The Incentive of the Maggot (nominated for the National Book Critics Circle poetry prize and the Lenore Marshall Prize) and The Great Wave. He is the host and editor of the online literary "gallery" On The Seawall, and he lives in Aquinnah, MA.

Other poems by Ron Slate in Verse Daily:
November 15, 2011:   "L'Etat C'Est Moi" "That's my green garden..."

Books by Ron Slate:

Other poems on the web by Ron Slate:
"To The One Who Hears Me"
"Night Crossing"
Six poems
Three poems

Ron Slate's Website.

Ron Slate on Twitter.

About Joy Ride:

"Ron Slate's Joy Ride moves with the movement of the mind. History and memory twine with the present, as spectral and intangible as the past. Loss and grief are not treated as spectacle, but they imbue every line. I love the way I feel when I read Joyce's and Chekhov's stories. These poems put me in a similar state—a kind of fugue, a surreal strangeness, but with a grounded adherence to the ordinary. Whatever this feeling is, there's no word for it. It's what I seek when I read and write poems, but to find it is rare. Joy Ride is the dream that the passage of time wakes in us."
—Diane Seuss

"In Ron Slate's long-awaited new book of poems, family stories intersect with public events. What interests me especially is the way that the stories in Joy Ride nest in meditations on the nature of storytelling itself. 'If a story satisfies, it has the power to hinder, and if it hinders then it has the power to satisfy,' Slate writes in a prose poem recounting his family's flight from Paris during the Occupation. This strikes me as an original and fascinating way to complicate and refresh narrative in poetry beyond anecdote. But most of all, to read Ron Slate is to experience vivid clarity."
—Daisy Fried

"Startling encounters with family and strangers at home and abroad, moments of wonder and sobering clarity—Ron Slate shapes experience into sophisticated poems that show the world in its raw and achingly beautiful forms. His words are astute and acutely observant."
—Rigoberto Gonzèlez