Ruth Stone had a vivid career as one of the late twentieth-century's most influential and pioneering poets. The Essential Ruth Stone distills her work into a single volume, drawing as easily from her first book, In an Iridescent Time (1959), as from her National Book Award winning In the Next Galaxy (2002) and the cosmic intellect of her final collection, What Love Comes To (2008). Stone was a visionary with a physical grasp on language. Her humorous, incisive poems offer a fierce mix of feminism, mysticism, wit, and passion, rendering portraits of an American childhood as well as the spectral appearances of a dead husband. "At my center / The bone glistens; of wondrous bones I am made," she writes in the early poem "Speculation." Indeed, at the center of Stone's life was poetry - an illuminating and authentic bond to craft - as she quietly influenced a generation of poets and will continue to do so in decades to come. The book includes an editor's note by the poet's grandaughter Bianca Stone, a writer and visual artist and director of programs for the Ruth Stone House. Book jacket.