A third collection of verse by the author of Strangely Marked Metal and Flamingo Watching presents a new collection of original, quirky, and provocative poetry.

Elephant Rocks: Poems (Grove Press Poetry Series)

Literature & Fiction

Ryan, Kay

Poetry

GROVE PRESS

Kay Ryan, named the Pulitzer Prize Winner for Poetry 2010, is just the latest in an amazing array of accolades for this wonderfully accessible, widely loved poet. She was appointed the Library of Congress’s sixteenth poet laureate from 2008 to 2010. Salon has compared her poems to Fabergé eggs, tiny, ingenious devices that inevitably conceal some hidden wonder.” The two hundred poems in Ryan’s The Best of It offer a stunning retrospective of her work, as well as a swath of never-before-published poems of which are sure to appeal equally to longtime fans and general readers.

The Best of It: New and Selected Poems

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 subjectsexistence, consciousness, love, lossin 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

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.

Elephant Rocks, Kay Ryan’s third book of verse, shows a virtuoso practitioner at the top of her form. Engaging and secretive, provocative and profound, Ryan’s poems have generated growing excitement with their appearances in The New Yorker and other leading periodicals. Sometimes gaudily ornamental, sometimes Shaker-plain, here is verse that is compact on the page and expansive in the mind.

Elephant Rocks: Poems

Filled with wry logic and a magical, unpredictable musicality, Kay Ryan's poems continue to generate excitement with their frequent appearances in The New Yorker and other leading periodicals. Say Uncle, Ryan's fifth collection, is filled with the same hidden connections, the same slyness and almost gleeful detachment that has delighted readers of her earlier books. Compact, searching, and oddly beautiful, these poems, in the words of Dana Gioia, "take the shape of an idea clarifying itself." "A poetry collection that marries wit and wisdom more brilliantly than any I know.... Poetry as statement and aphorism is rarely heartbreaking, but reading these poems I find myself continually ambushed by a fundamental sorrow, one that hides behind a surface that interweaves sound and sense in immaculately interesting ways." -- Jane Hirshfield, Common Boundary; "The first thing you notice about her poems is an elbow-to-the-ribs playfulness." -- Patricia Holt, San Francisco Chronicle.

Say Uncle: Poems

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.

The Niagara River: Poems (Grove Press Poetry)

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 poether 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 poemsall of which are sure to appeal equally to longtime fans and general readers.

Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose

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 anAmerican master.

Essays & Correspondence

Product Description 
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\nSynthesizing 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.\nA 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. 
 Review 
PRAISE FOR SYNTHESIZING GRAVITY\n“ 
Synthesizing Gravity is a delight, if a tart and idiosyncratic one... There is no mystical bombast here whatsoever. Indeed, there is very nearly the opposite, delivered by a writer with a full command of the English sentence and an electric talent for metaphor... [I]f Ryan gives us a view through a keyhole, it’s a view often made richer by its constraints.”― 
New York Times\n“Reading Ryan’s writing will charge and recharge the mind. This is the first collection of nonfiction from Ryan, a national treasure.... [and] a wonderful entry point to her work.”― 
San Francisco Chronicle\n“Brilliant...For poetry enthusiasts and skeptics alike, this will be an inviting portal into the mind of one of America’s greatest living writers.”― 
Publishers Weekly (starred review)\n“Damn fine prose ... What a wonderful voice [Ryan] displays... She’s a kind of wisecracking philosopher, a truly original thinker, a quantum physicist of space who also, clearly, knows how her own clear voice sounds better than when alone.”― 
John Freeman, "Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2020"\n"An eminent American poet turns to prose to illuminate her craft and her life... You will come away from [Kay Ryan's] refreshing 
Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose―her first collection of nonfiction―with a deeper appreciation of poetry's worth."― 
Shelf Awareness\nPraise for Kay Ryan: 
“[Ryan] has the uncanny ability to construct a tiny word-mechanism that produces the experience of genuine wonder.” 
―Washington Post\n“Everything [Ryan’s] eye falls upon takes on a brisk, beautifully complete clarity. Her tidy lines disguise an enormous intelligence and tonal warmth: a ferocious capacity for finding the essence of things.” 
―Los Angeles Times\n“Ryan’s poems are consistent delights. . . [they] are what Robert Frost said all poems must be, momentary stays against confusion.” 
―San Francisco Chronicle\n“{Ryan] excels at aphoristic wit, yet reveals an intensity of emotion . . . You won’t find any clutter in her work, which never fails to surprise, enlighten and delight.” 
―Newsday\n“You can’t help consuming [her] poems quickly, the way you are supposed to consume freshly made cocktails: while they are still smiling at you. But you immediately double back―what was that?―and their moral and intellectual bite blindsides you.” 
―New York Times\n“Ryan's poems are witty, reserved, unprepossessing, impersonal, small-scale, as well as short-lined, practical rather than spiritual, never boastful.” 
―Guardian\n“Melancholy lucidity is Ryan’s greatest gift.” 
―New Yorker 
 About the Author 
Kay Ryan is a lifetime Californian whose honors include the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal awarded by President Obama. She served two terms as U.S. Poet Laureate and is a former MacArthur Fellow.

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Books by Ryan, Kay

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ryan, Kay. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Elephant Rocks: Poems (Grove Press Poetry Series)

The Best of It: New and Selected Poems

Erratic Facts

Erratic Facts

Elephant Rocks: Poems

Say Uncle: Poems

The Niagara River: Poems (Grove Press Poetry)

The Best of It: New and Selected Poems

Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose

Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose