For a Limited Time Only

by Ronald Wallace

Overview

For a Limited TIme Only, Ronald Wallace's eighth collection of poems, is perhaps his darkest and most meditative to date, focusing his experiences with illness, old age, and mortality; his father-in-law's death after a long bout with Alzheimer's; his step-father's death after a  painful struggle with esophageal cancer, his own bout with prostate cancer. These personal experiences form the core of the first three sections of the book, but are mediated by theological and philosophical speculations that find further voice in the character of a “Mr. Grim,” whose angry, self-pitying, gruff, comic, self-depreciating, nostalgic, defeated, and hopeful riffs on the human condition provide a bridge to the affirmative, often comic, close. In the final two sections, in poems in praise of his dentist, his barber, his wife, his grandparents, the morpheme, Mr. Malaprop, Pluto, tattoos, hamburger heaven, sex talk, and poetry itself, Wallace once again proves the resilience of hope and humor in what is, for him, finally a world of wonders.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822959960
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	08/01/2008
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	104
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.70(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Ronald Wallace is the author of seven previous books of poetry, including: Long for This World: New and Selected Poems; The Uses of Adversity; Time's Fancy; People and Dog in the Sun; and The Makings of Happiness. His works of literary criticism include: God Be with the Clown: Humor in American Poetry; The Last Laugh: Form and Affirmation in the Contemporary American Comic Novel; and Henry James and the Comic Form. Wallace is Halls-Bascom Professor of English, Felix Pollak Professor of Poetry, and codirector of the creative writing program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Editorial Reviews

This is a death-inflected collection, filled with meditations upon illness that refuse to buckle in the face of the unspeakable. His wrenching elegies and playful celebrations of the self are always buoyed by his understanding of the richness of experience. Ronald Wallace’s touch is remarkably light even when his heart is heavy.”
—David St. John in Ploughshares



“Long one of our liveliest, most readable poets, Ron Wallace, in For a Limited Time Only, enters the dark woods of Mr. Grim, where three bad wolves-Age, Loss, and Illness-wait to swallow him. Never fear. Keeping his formidable wit about him, Wallace writes his way out of all three bellies, and-sadder, a little grayer, but still unbowed-springs back 'into the dust and sun-struck air' of the world that he helps us to love.”
—Charles Harper Webb


“Ron Wallace's For a Limited Time Only is a verbally mischievous, frankly droll look at illness and aging. These munificent poems embrace the private world-its horrors and pleasures-as well as the cultural world of revisionist fairy tales, children's books, and television. Barbed and poignant, inventive and philosophical, Wallace's poems are continually surprising and formally nimble. For a Limited Time Only shimmers with complication, wit, and wisdom. While our bodies may betray us, Wallace's poems do not.”
—Denise Duhamel

From the Publisher