In the Next Galaxy

Winner of the National Book Award, In the Next Galaxy is Ruth Stone’s eighth collection. The judges commented, “At an age when many are merely repeating themselves, Ruth Stone has taken on new themes and images, created with both a seer’s eye and the eye of social witness. Of remembered love, loss, and poverty, she writes with such a force of intelligence and compassionate dispassion that even the most humble, commonplace things inhabit a world made strange, lucid, luminous. In the Next Galaxy gives us the unflinching vision of a woman well into her eighties, fully inhabiting body and mind, writing poems that are vital and eloquent distillations of experience.” Ruth Stone is a storyteller, writing with a crackling intelligence from the vantage point of an aging and impoverished woman. Wise, sardonic, crafty, and misleadingly simple, Stone loves heavy themes but not heavy poems.