Marie Ponsot, the winner of Poetry magazine’s Ruth Lily Prize for lifetime achievement as well as the Poetry Society of America’s Frost Medal, was born in 1921. She began her career at the age of eight, publishing a poem in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. She is the author of six previous collections, including The Bird Catcher, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. A professor emerita of English at Queens College, CUNY, she has also taught at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y and at the New School University. Her other honors include the Phi Beta Kappa Medal and the Shaughnessy Prize of the Modern Language Association. Ponsot is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and lives in New York City.

At last, the stunning lifework of this beloved, prize-winning poet gathered in one volume, covering sixty years of poetry, from 1956 to 2016.

Born in 1921, Marie Ponsot began her career in 1956 with True Minds, one of the famous Pocket Poets pamphlets published by City Lights. After this auspicious beginning, Ponsot went on to an unconventional career and would not publish again until 1981, when Admit Impediment was published by Knopf. Her reemergence--after raising seven children and always writing, if not actively publishing--brought us a writer of mature wit, unusual rhythms and a poetry of sparkling surface, though her ear is tuned always to the deeper music of human feeling. Ponsot values the local and personal as a proving ground for the grand mysteries, and in examining the powerful underground life of women, her poetry is as practical as it is profound.