What Love Comes To

Finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize, this retrospective of Ruth Stone's poetry combines the best work from twelve previous volumes with an abundance of new poems. This comprehensive selection includes early formal lyrics, fierce political poems, and meditations on her husband's suicide and her own blindness. As Sharon Olds says in her foreword, "A Ruth Stone poem feels alive in the hands--ardent, independent, restless." What Love Comes To is a necessary collection from an American original. Can it be that memory is useless, like a torn web hanging in the wind? Sometimes it billows out, a full high gauze--like a canopy. But the air passes through the rents and it falls again and flaps shapeless like the ghost rag that it is--hanging at the window of an empty room.