Great Wave

by Ron Slate

In his acclaimed debut collection "The Incentive of the""Maggot, " Ron Slate delivered an ingenious and enigmatic account of the intersections of global, family and personal histories. Now, in "The Great Wave, " a more personal tone asserts itself as Slate fashions poignant and haunting poems that shock us with a recognition of our perilous times. These are poems of strange and sometimes caustic assessment, reflecting on family, the work life, catastrophe, creativity, solitude, and desire--tracking the transit between reality and the imagination, and creating the sound of its discoveries. Seductive, demanding, witty, and embittered, Slate's voice comes from a secret, intimate space abutting a large, incongruous world.
The poems in "The Great Wave, " so taken with the collisions between history and contemporary life, remind us that the role of poetry is to confirm our existence by giving shape to the inner world.

Genres: Poetry

Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Ron Slate was born in Quincy, Massachusetts. He earned his Masters degree in creative writing from Stanford University and studied American literature at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He edited a poetry magazine, The Chowder Review, for 15 years. From 1994-2001, he was vice president of global communications for EMC Corporation, then was chief operating officer of a biotech/life sciences start-up. He is currently a board member of the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities (“Mass Humanities”), a member of the National Book Critics Circle, and a judge for the 2019 PEN America Translation Prize. He lives in Milton and Aquinnah, Massachusett

The Incentive of the Maggot, his first book of poems, was published by Houghton Mifflin. The collection was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle poetry prize and the Lenore Marshall Prize of the Academy of American Poets. The collection won the Bakeless Poetry Prize (Breadloaf Writers Conference) and the Larry Levis Reading Prize of Virginia Commonwealth University. The Great Wave, his second book, was also published by Houghton.

In 2016, Ron and his daughter Jenny Slate co-wrote and published a memoir, About The House, via the generosity-based publisher Concord Free Press, helping to raise over $200,000 for non-profit organizations in the USA and abroad including Planned Parenthood and the ACLU.

(source: ronslate.com)