Ron Slate

Ron Slate's book of poems The Incentive of the Maggot was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2005. A second book of poems, The Great Wave, will be published by Houghton in spring 2009.

Last week I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

For review assignments, I've just finished Jake Adam York's second book of poems A Murmuration of Starlings (So. Ill. Univ Press), Francine Prose's forthcoming novel Goldengrove (Harper), Elaine Sexton's poems in Causeway (New Issues), and Mel Bochner's Solar System & Rest Rooms: Writings and Interviews 1965-2007 (MIT Press).

For my pleasure (though the titles above offer this as well), I'm reading Frank Bidart's poems Watching the Spring Festival (Farrar Straus), Michael Kruger's novel The Executor (Harcourt) and Anthony Cave Brown's book on the Saudis and Aramco, Oil, God and Gold (Houghton 1999).

Next in line: For a Limited Time Only, poems by Ronald Wallace (just out from Pittsburgh); Lands of Memory, stories by Felisberto Hernandez (born in Montevideo, lived and worked in Argentina), published in July by New Directions; and Radical Vernacular, essays on the poet Lorine Niedecker (d. 1970) from Iowa, edited by Elizabeth Williams.

Ron Slate, the winner of the 2004 Bakeless Prize for Poetry, is a graduate of the Stanford University Writing Program. He was the editor of the Chowder Review from 1973 to 1988. Poems from The Incentive of the Maggot appeared in The New Yorker, TriQuarterly, The Threepenny Review, and Slate.com.

Visit Ron Slate's website for a selection of his published poems and reviews and commentary.

--Marshal Zeringue