"A collection of poems that give rich drama to ordinary experience, deepening our sense of what it means to be human."--Pulitzer Prize finalist citation

"There is a broad, powerful streak of independence--even disobedience--that runs through Stone's writing and has inspired a great number of women after her."--"Guardian"

Finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize, this retrospective of Ruth Stone's poetry combines the best work from twelve previous volumes with an abundance of new poems. This comprehensive selection includes early formal lyrics, fierce political poems, and meditations on her husband's suicide and her own blindness. As Sharon Olds says in her foreword, "A Ruth Stone poem feels alive in the hands--ardent, independent, restless." "What Love Comes To" is a necessary collection from an American original.

"Can it be that
memory is useless,
like a torn web
hanging in the wind?
Sometimes it billows
out, a full high gauze--
like a canopy.
But the air passes
through the rents
and it falls again and flaps
shapeless
like the ghost rag that it is--
hanging at the window
of an empty room."

Ruth Stone is the author of twelve books of poetry. Among her many awards are the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Eric Mathieu King Award, a Whiting Award, and she was a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. She taught creative writing at many universities, finally settling at SUNY Binghamton. She lives in Vermont.

Ruth Stone once said, 'I decided very early on not to write like other people.' What Love Comes To shows the fruits of this resolve in the lifetime's work of a true American original. The winner of the National Book Award at the age of 87, Ruth Stone was still writing extraordinary poetry well into her 90s. This comprehensive selection includes early formal lyrics, fierce feminist and political poems, and meditations on her husband's suicide, on love, loss, blindness and ageing. What Love Comes To opens up her own particular world of serious laughter; of uncertainty and insight; of mystery and acceptance. It is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. The book has a foreword by Sharon Olds, who 'had the joy of meeting Ruth Stone' as a teenager, a later encounter giving her 'a vision of a genius at work': 'Ruth Stone's poems are mysterious, hilarious, powerful. They are understandable, often with a very clear surface, but not simple - their intelligence is crackling and complex... She is a poet of great humor - mockery even - and a bold eye, not obedient. There is also disrespect in her poems, a taken freedom, that feels to me like a strength of the disenfranchised. Ruth's poems are direct and lissome, her plainness is elegant and shapely, her music is basic, classical: it feels as real as the movement of matter. When we hear a Stone first line, it is as if we have been hearing this voice in our head all day, and just now the words become audible. She is a seer, easily speaking clear truths somehow unmentioned until now... She has a tragic deadpan humor: love and destruction are right next to each other...'

"Her poems startle us over and over with their shapeliness, their humor, their youthfulness, their wild aptness, their strangeness, their sudden familiarity, the authority of their insights, the moral gulps they prompt, their fierce exactness of language and memory."-Galway Kinnell on presenting the Wallace Stevens Award

""In the Next Galaxy" gives us the unflinching vision of a woman well into her '80s, fully inhabiting body and mind."-National Book Award Judges' statement

"Compassionate, comic, feminist and horrified by injustice, Stone's poems are composed with an accessible deftness."-"The Oregonian"

Ruth Stone has earned nearly every major literary award for her poetry. She taught at many universities, finally settling at SUNY Binghamton. Today she lives in Vermont.

Theory for Ethnomusicology: Histories, Conversations, Insights, Second Edition, is a foundational work for courses in ethnomusicological theory. The book examines key intellectual movements and topic areas in social and cultural theory, and explores the way they have been taken up in ethnomusicological research. New co-author Harris M. Berger and Ruth M. Stone investigate the discipline's past, present, and future, reflecting on contemporary concerns while cataloging significant developments since the publication of the first edition in 2008. A dozen contributors approach a broad range of theoretical topics alive in ethnomusicology. Each chapter examines ethnographic and historical works from within ethnomusicology, showcasing the unique contributions scholars in the field have made to wider, transdisciplinary dialogs, while illuminating the field's relevance and pointing the way toward new horizons of research. New to this edition: Every chapter in the book is completely new, with richer and more comprehensive discussions. New chapters have been added on gender and sexuality, sound and voice studies, performance and critical improvisation studies, and theories of participation. New text boxes and notes make connections among the chapters, emphasizing points of contact and conflict among intellectual movements.