Pandora's Kitchen

Ron Koertge, taught at Pasadena City College for thirty-seven years. A prolific writer, he has published more than thirty books of poetry and prose. Some of his most recent books are Fever (Red Hen Press 2006), Indigo (Red Hen Press 2009), The Ogre’s Wife (Red Hen Press 2013), and Vampire Planet (Red Hen Press 2015). He is the recipient of grants from the NEA and the California Arts Council and has poems in two volumes of Best American Poetry (1999 and 2005). A recent Pushcart Prize winner, he is also the author of “Negative Space,” the prose poem upon which the stop-motion film by the same name was based and was shortlisted for an Oscar in Animated Short Films in 2018. He resides in South Pasadena, California.

“It appears that Ron Koertge will not rest until he has toppled every icon in Western civilization. Here it’s Pandora, Ishmael aboard the “Peapod,” and even Fanny Brawn who get flipped on their heads. If only his poems were not so witty, gently sarcastic, and deeply warm-hearted, they would be mere shenanigans. Instead, they are poetry at its best, causing his readers to laugh, think, and feel anew.”—Billy Collins, former US poet laureate“Yes, Ron Koertge is a bit of a magician. He transforms master narratives (fairy tales, Bible stories, Greek myths, horror movies, and more) into poems rich with contradictions, role reversals, juicy ambiguities, and as Emily Dickinson put it, "truth's superb surprise." Moral certainties and stereotypes vanish in these sly/subversive, satiric/tender, achingly funny/humane poems. Koertge creates brilliant mashups of ancient and contemporary human frailties (spoiler alert: they remain the same across history) reminding us that the gods, monsters, aliens, and heroes whose stories we thirst for inhabit us all.”—Amy Gerstler, author of Scattered at Sea