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This poem originally appeared in the February 2010 issue of Poetry magazine
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By Spencer Reece
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By Robert Bly
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By D. A. Powell
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Born in California in 1945 and acknowledged as one of the most original voices in the contemporary landscape, Kay Ryan is the author of several books of poetry, including Flamingo Watching (2006), The Niagara River (2005), and Say Uncle (2000). Her book The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (2010) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Ryan's tightly compressed, rhythmically dense poetry is often compared to that of Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore; however, Ryan’s often barbed wit and unique facility with “recombinant” rhyme has earned her the status of one of the great living American poets, and led to her appointment as U.S. Poet Laureate in 2008. She held the position for two terms, using the appointment to champion community colleges like the one in Marin County, California where she and her partner Carol Adair taught for over thirty years. In an interview with the Washington City Paper at the... -
Poems By Kay Ryan
- Thin
- Tar Babies
- Rats' Tails
- On the Difficulty of Drawing Oneself Up
- Salvage
- Lighthouse Keeping
- Marianne Moore Announces Lunch
- The Egyptians
- The New Kabbalists
- Renaissance
- DON'T LOOK BACK
- GRAZING HORSES
- The Pieces That Fall to Earth
- Why We Must Struggle
- Herring
- Winter Fear
- THE FABRIC OF LIFE
- TEST
- Tenderness and Rot
- Stardust
- Post-Construction
- Expectations
- Backward Miracle
- Home to Roost
- The Niagara River
- TUNE
- CHINESE FOOT CHART
- THE OTHER SHOE
- LEAST ACTION
- THE LIGHT OF INTERIORS
- REPULSIVE THEORY
- Sharks' Teeth
- The Best of It
- Almost without Surface
- Carrying a Ladder
- Chop
- Blue China Doorknob
- Needle
- Atlas
- He Lit a Fire with Icicles
- Felix Crow
- Latents
- Fake Spots
- Duck
- A Ball Rolls on a Point
- Rubbing Lamps
- Houdini
- Flamingo Watching
- Soft
- A Hundred Bolts of Satin
- Blandeur
- Surfaces
- Polish and Balm
- We're Building the Ship as We Sail It
- Crown
- Train-Track Figure
- Pentimenti
- Repetition
- The Late Worm
- Cut Out For It
- Turtle
- Paired Things
- Bait Goat
- Crocodile Tears
- Two More, and Up Goes the Donkey
- Cloud
- All You Did
- Linens
- The Obsoletion of a Language
- Blast
- Pinhole
- A Certain Kind of Eden
- New Rooms
- Miser Time
- Party Ship
- Still Start
- Album
- Salvations
- In Case of Complete Reversal
- All Your Horses
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