Big Cabin

Praise for Big Cabin

“Deeply pleasing to read.” —The Paris Review Daily

“Padgett’s plainspoken, wry poems deliver their wisdom through a kind of connoisseurship of absurdity.” —The New Yorker

“Wonderful, generous, funny poetry.” —John Ashbery

“Reading Padgett one realizes that playfulness and lightness of touch are not at odds with seriousness. . . . As is often the case, leave it to the comic writer to best convey our tragic predicament.” —New York Review of Books 

“One of the motivations driving the poems is the poet’s desire for knowledge, which he pursues without making any grand claims for this yearning. It is Padgett’s craving that animates his writing, and keeps him alert to the small and easily dismissed moments that make up our everyday lives.” —Hyperallergic

“Ron Padgett exposes the interconnectivity of past and present, the ways our conception of self is defined in relation to others, and how our inescapable sentience and use of language is what both connects and estranges us from the world around us.” —3:AM Magazine

“Padgett exercises his poetic license with the purity of his intent despite the tongue in cheek sparkle of his eyes. Among the many adjectives used to describe Padgett’s poetry, the most telling is almost never used: subversive.” —Black Bart Poetry Society

“The poet makes superlative use of the directive writing consciousness—often automatic pilot—to tap the unconscious for memory, vision, emotion, and the unexpected and indefinable. The poems speak backwards and forwards in time, to self, to family and friends, to poetic technique, to the birds caged in the chest. It is so lovely.” —Alice Notley

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