Between 1973 and 1980 Ronald Koertge published several small books and chapbooks of poems with small independent presses; since then, he has published two longer collections, Diary Cows (1981) and the most comprehensive single volume of his poetry available, Life on the Edge of the Continent: Selected Poems (1982). Koertge's work falls somewhat outside the mainstream of contemporary American poetry because of his characteristic use of a quirky and unrelenting humor, his selection of down-and-out characters as subjects, and his refusal to take himself or his characters entirely seriously. Koertge provides a slightly askew vision of a more than slightly askew world, ruthlessly ridiculing the cliché, the pretentious, and the ponderous. While the tone of his work is almost always mockingly ironic, it is also, in Koertge's plain, offhand manner, almost always compassionate.

Born on 22 April 1940 in Olney, Illinois, Koertge was the only child of William H. Koertge and Bulis Fiscus...