Ron Koertge’s Yellow Moving Van is a collection of relaxed and buoyant and sometimes very funny poems that address Desi & Lucy with the same courtesy as Walt Whitman. The author celebrates his roots in the Mid-West and a few pages later stops off in Transylvania. These poems like to sometimes embrace and sometimes confound expectations, and they all stand together as enemies of the murky and pompous. There is apparently no subject—Prometheus, a fifty foot woman, or Death himself—that is unwilling to fall under his spell.

Ron Koertge, a long-time resident of South Pasadena, California, taught English and Creative Writing at Pasadena City College for thirty-seven years.  He has published more than a dozen books of poetry, and is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council, has poems in two volumes of Best American Poetry, and is a 2017 Pushcart Prize winner. Koertge is also the author of the poem “Negative Space,” short-listed for a 2017 Oscar in Animated Short Films. He teaches at Hamline University in their low-residency MFA program. 
 

“In the funhouse world of Ron Koertge, Mary’s halo is as big as an inner tube, Mrs. Death fills in for her dreaded husband, and it takes a whole day and a half to build Rome. These new poems will entertain you so well, you might not even notice how the poet is issuing everywhere little appeals to your heart.” —Billy Collins

“Who wouldn’t want to read poems entitled “Lovesick Girls in Prison”, “Reading to the Bland,” or “Death Hands Me the Scythe?” In Ron Koertge’s Yellow Moving Van, you might not be certain if you should laugh out loud or squirm with recognition at our common humanity.” —Laurel Ann Bogen

“Ron Koertge re-visits myths, write about farmers in the heartland, and chats with the breeze in Southern California. I’m going to give this book to all my friends.” —Charles Harper Webb