Erratic Facts
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“Clear and lucid” poems from a US Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner who “journeys through the landscape of memory, consciousness, loss, and love” (The Washington Post).
Kay Ryan is acclaimed for her highly relatable, 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, clearheaded, 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. Her sly rhymes and strong cadences convey both musicality and wisdom. While these pieces are composed of the same brevity and vitality that have characterized her singular voice over the course of more than twenty years, her imagination is more eccentric and daring than ever. Erratic Facts solidifies Ryan’s place at the pinnacle of American poetry.
“Read a poem once and take in its crisp rhythms, subtle rhymes, and arresting images. Read it again and detect its hide-and-seek metaphors and meanings. . . . [Ryan’s] quantum poems pose resonant questions of physics and metaphysics, of attentiveness and caring on scales intimate and universal.” —Booklist
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ryan, a MacArthur Fellow and former Poet Laureate, follows her Pulitzer Prize winning The Best of It with a ninth collection of her signature short, brilliant poems. Drawing upon epigraphs from such varied sources as W.G. Sebald, NPR, and the New York Times science section, Ryan teases out thoughts with shifting rhyme schemes as her poems display their alluring logic and peculiar practicality. In Ryan's world, a water wheel's buckets are "all the ornaments/ of torque," while an anticipated conversation becomes something "sizzling inside a face," and a crow's stride "criss crosses/ as though/ each step/ checked the/ last." But her quirky lightness is deceptive; each instance Ryan captures and examines reveals the darkness beneath its charming veneer. Her poem "Almost" likens the movements of thought to a slaughterhouse: "The mind/ likes the squeeze/ of chutes and channels./ It will go up the ramp/ with cattle, pleased / almost to the last minute." In another piece, she toys with obsessively returning to the same thought that "can't/ deepen and yet/ you think it again:/ you have lost/ count. A larger/ amount is/ no longer a/ larger amount." With Ryan, readers make new discoveries and then discover what's been lost: "There are hills/ you long to touch,/ velvet to the eyes.// So much is soft/ the wrong size."
