Kirjahaku

Kay Ryan--"a classic American poet" (John Freeman)--is acclaimed for her highly intelligible, deeply insightful poems. Erratic Facts is her first new collection since the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Best of It, and it is animated with her signature swift, lucid, lyrical style. At once witty and melancholy, playful and heartfelt, Ryan examines enormous subjects--existence, consciousness, love, loss--in compact poems that have immensely powerful resonance. Sly rhymes and strong cadences lend remarkable musicality to her incisive wisdom. While these pieces are composed of the same brevity and vitality that has characterized her singular voice over the course of more than 20 years, her mind is sharper than ever, her imagination more eccentric and daring. Erratic Facts solidifies Ryan's place at the pinnacle of American poetry, and proves that she will remain among the leading innovators in literary history.

Erratic Facts, Kay Ryan's first collection since the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Best of It, offers sixty-plus new examples of her swift, lucid style. Ryan examines enormous subjects with compact poems in which sly rhymes and syncopation lend an off-foot musicality to unnerving wisdom. These poems demonstrate the same quick-fire brain-work that has animated her verse for the last thirty years, in ways more daring than ever.

A new anthology of poetry by the award-winning author of Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends and Flamingo Watching presents an array of mgical, unpredictable, and lyrical works that explores the hidden connections of ordinary events and objects. Original.

In the citation accompanying Kay's recent award of the prestigious Ruth Lilly Prize, Christine Wiman wrote: "Kay Ryan can take any subject and make it her own. Her poems-which combine extreme concision and formal expertise with broad subjects and deep feeling-could never be mistaken for anyone else's. Her work has the kind of singularity and sustained integrity that are very, very rare?. It's always a dicey business predicting the literary future?[but] for this reader, these poems feel as if there were built to last, and?they have the passion, precision and sheer weirdness to do so."Salon compared the poems in Ryan's last collection to "Fabergé eggs, tiny, ingenious devices that inevitably conceal some hidden wonder." The exquisite poems in The Niagara River provide similarly hidden gems. Bafflingly effective, they seem too brief and blithe to pack so much wallop. Intense and relaxed at once, both buoyant and rueful, their singular music appeals to many people. Her poems, products of an immaculately off-kilter mind, have been featured everywhere from the Sunday funnies to New York subways to plaques at the zoo to the pages of The New Yorker.

Kay Ryan's recently concluded two-year term as the Library of Congress's sixteenth poet laureate is just the latest in an amazing array of accolades for this wonderfully accessible, widely loved poet--her awards include the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation, four Pushcart Prizes, and a Guggenheim fellowship. Ryan's The Best of It: New and Selected Poems has garnered lavish praise. The two hundred poems in The Best of It offer a stunning retrospective of her work, as well as a swath of never-before-published poems--all of which are sure to appeal equally to longtime fans and general readers.

The first-ever collection of essays by one of our most distinguished and distinctive poets, Pulitzer Prize-winner and former Poet Laureate of the United States, Kay RyanSynthesizing Gravity gathers for the first time a thirty-year selection of Kay Ryan's probings into aesthetics, poetics, and the mind in pursuit of art.A bracing collection of critical prose, book reviews, and her private previously unpublished soundings of poems and poets-- including Robert Frost, Stevie Smith, Marianne Moore, William Bronk, and Emily Dickinson-- Synthesizing Gravity bristles with Ryan's crisp wit, her keen off-kilter insights, and her appetite and appreciation for the genuine. Among essays like "Radiantly Indefensible," "Notes on the Danger of Notebooks," and "The Abrasion of Loneliness," are piquant pieces on the virtues of emptiness, forgetfulness, and other under-loved concepts. Edited and with an introduction by Christian Wiman, this generous collection of Ryan's distinctive thinking gives us a surprising look into the mind of an American master.

The first-ever collection of essays by one of our most distinguished and distinctive poets, Pulitzer Prize-winner and former Poet Laureate of the United States, Kay Ryan Synthesizing Gravity gathers for the first time a thirty-year selection of Kay Ryan's probings into aesthetics, poetics, and the mind in pursuit of art. A bracing collection of critical prose, book reviews, and her private previously unpublished soundings of poems and poets-- including Robert Frost, Stevie Smith, Marianne Moore, William Bronk, and Emily Dickinson-- Synthesizing Gravity bristles with Ryan's crisp wit, her keen off-kilter insights, and her appetite and appreciation for the genuine. Among essays like "Radiantly Indefensible," "Notes on the Danger of Notebooks," and "The Abrasion of Loneliness," are piquant pieces on the virtues of emptiness, forgetfulness, and other under-loved concepts. Edited and with an introduction by Christian Wiman, this generous collection of Ryan's distinctive thinking gives us a surprising look into the mind of an American master.

In Odd Blocks Kay Ryan, the acclaimed American poet, presents her work to European readers for the first time. The book includes twenty-one new poems, seven of them first published here. Ryan's flamboyant imagination sparks in spare and elegant verse. 'Edges,' she has said, 'are the most powerful parts of the poem. The more edges you have the more power you have.' These poems take by surprise, and increase in resonance.