SOURCE: Lindner, April. “A Tender Brutality: Ruth Stone's Poems of the Body.” Paintbrush: A Journal of Poetry and Translation 27 (2000/2001): 109-16.

In the following essay, the author contends that the body in Stone's poetry is often a site of “wild, mordant humor.” In poems such as “Nuns at Lunch on the Bus,” “Split, Conjugate, Whatever,” and “Message from Your Toes,” Stone's poetic gaze refuses to rest on the surface of the body but insists on traveling into the physical processes that make us human.

Ruth Stone's singular poetic voice manages to reconcile many contradictions: warm and expansive as often as it is flinty, funny but deeply serious, her voice is unafraid of sentiment, and yet resolutely unsentimental. The result is a wild, mordant humor that leavens even the heaviest of subjects, a wit made necessary by the poet's project: to look closely, unflinchingly, at life's dark side. This is...