Zone: Selected Poems of Guillaume Apollinaire is the fruit of poet-translator Ron Padgett’s fifty-year engagement with the great French poet’s life and work. Zone provides an exciting experience of the full range of Apollinaire’s poetry, from his traditional lyric verse to his avant-garde calligrammatic pieces, from often anthologized classics to hitherto untranslated gems, from visionary poems of cosmic breadth to a poem about his shoes. This volume includes an introduction by Peter Read, the finest Apollinaire scholar in the English-speaking world, as well as a preface, helpful endnotes, and an annotated bibliography by Padgett. There have been previous versions of Apollinaire, but this one is special, for it is not only a compact and judicious selection of the essential Apollinaire, it is also a feat of translation by an American poet about whom the Washington Post said, No praise can be too high for Ron Padgett’s translations.