Ron Padgett's Pink Dust

[BONUS Letter] "I thought 2020 was going to be a great year, like perfect eyesight..."

Ron Padgett. Pink Dust. NYRB Poets, 2025. 111 pp.

Your host had forgotten that there was a new collection from Ron Padgett this year, and never expected that I would post about it as a bonus letter for the Stack, but I ended up reading the whole thing on a single subway ride, so here we are.

Sometimes an author portrait corresponds so much to their work, and the photo of Padgett for this book does that. A warm, twinkly-eyed face wearing a black turtleneck: that’s precisely the kind of poetic voice I hear from his books: Ron the friendly existentialist.

(“All my life I’ve been dogged by good luck, except for the bad luck of being born.”)