The Incentive of the Maggot

In his prize-winning debut collection, Ron Slate seeks out the intersections of art, technology, and humanity with intelligence, wit, and fervor. His unique voice is informed by his world travels as a business executive. As Robert Pinsky writes in his introduction, Slate "brings together the personal and the global in a way that is distinctive, subtle, defying expectations about what is political and what is personal." In Slate's words, "Is this the end of the world? / No just the end / of the language that describes it." Recently published in The New Yorker, Slate has been praised by James Longenbach for his ability to "make the known world seem wickedly strange -- a poetry that is utterly of the moment, our moment, because it sounds like nobody else."