A Chancellor of the American Academy of Poets since 2006, Kay Ryan won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for The Best of It and was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 2008 until 2010. She has lived in Marin County, California, since 1971.
The Best of It - Pulitzer Prize Winner for Poetry "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. The
Best of It reveals that right before our eyes Ryan has become a
classic American poet."--John Freeman, Los Angeles Times "Ryan is
one of the few contemporary poets to have imitators because she is
one of the few truly compelling stylists now at work. Her voice is
authoritative, confident, unfussy, exacting...she is astutely
reserved, watchful, and understands that no one is special in his
or her grief...So many "new and selected" volumes come out each
year, but The Best of It is rare in being truly the best of the
poet's work so far. Kay Ryan is so disarming, so fresh and
original, that she has earned her recent reputation as one of the
very best poets among us."--David Mason, The Hudson Review "Ryan's
poems are consistent delights. They fizz with euphonies, they
crackle with rhyme and off-rhyme...they are marvels of compact,
slightly bitter wit...Ryan's poems are what Robert Frost said all
poems must be, momentary stays against confusion."--Stephen Burt,
San Francisco Chronicle "The Best of It is a generous and nearly
career-spanning collection of her verse, a greatest-hits album of a
sort...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."--Dwight Garner, The New York Times "Melancholy lucidity is
Ryan's greatest gift, and it can be heard in all her most
successful poems. But her most startling discovery is that
melancholy, with its tendency to brood and spread, is best
contained in a form that is tight, witty, almost sprightly
sounding. Her poems are often built on the logic of the pun, taking
an ordinary word or dead cliché as a title and then jolting it to
unexpected life."--Adam Kirsch, The New Yorker "Ryan's oblique
humor runs from grim to whimsical, from delighted to sardonic . . .
Despite her desert beginnings, she cannot disavow her own talent
and taste, her intelligence and achievement . . . From a life that
has not been easy, she has mined nuggets that add to American
poetic wealth."--Helen Vendler, The New York Review of Books
"Ryan...may well be the oddest and wisest poet to hold that
prestigious post. Her tiny, skinny poems back a punch unlike
anything else in contemporary poetry, though not unlike haiku, if
haiku could be cut with a dash of Groucho Marx. This, her first
retrospective volume, which also contains a book's worth of new
poems, is a much-needed introduction to the work of one of our best
and most accessible poets. She asks the necessary questions hiding
just beneath the obvious ones...Pithy poems manage to encapsulate
far more than their few words should hold...Sassy, smart and deep
as they are hilarious, Ryan's poems are among the
best."--Publishers Weekly (starred review) "When she's at the top
of her game, [Ryan] has the uncanny ability to construct a tiny
word-mechanism that produces the experience of genuine wonder...In
the utter complexity of her vision and lyricism, I'm reminded of
those mechanical devices of the ancient world meant to show us our
place among the stars and help us navigate the uncharted darkness
beyond. And in the very best examples, Ryan's poems do precisely
that."--Steven Ratiner, The Washington Post "Kay Ryan is a
distinctive and original voice within the rich variety of
contemporary American poetry. She writes easily understandable
short poems on improbable subjects. Within her compact compositions
there are many surprises in rhyme and rhythm and in sly wit
pointing to subtle wisdom."--Dr. James H. Billington, Librarian of
Congress "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."--Christian Wiman, editor of
Poetry magazine and chair of the Ruth Lilly selection committee
"[Ryan's] poems . . . [are] surprising and fresh, keeping the
reader slightly off-kilter...As the poems swerve between images and
ideas, meaning and sound, white space and the black ink of a
line--between surface action and metaphorical depths--the attentive
reader will see a glimmer of secret life."--Louisa Thomas,
Newsweek
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