KAY RYAN, POET

“No new poet has so deeply impressed me with her imaginative flair or originality as Kay Ryan. . . . She is not obscure but sly, dense, elliptical, and suggestive. She plays with her readers—not maliciously or gratuitously but to rouse them from conventional response and expectation.” —Dana Gioia

“Her poems are compact, exhilarating, strange affairs, like Erik Satie miniatures or Joseph Cornell boxes. She is an anomaly in today's literary culture: as intense and elliptical as Dickinson, as buoyant and rueful as Frost.” —J. D. McClatchy

Kay Ryan's sixth book of poems, The Niagara River, was released in the Fall of 2005 by Grove Press. Her previous books include Say Uncle (2000), and Elephant Rocks (1996), both from the Grove Press Poetry Series. Her book Flamingo Watching (1995) was a finalist for both the Lamont Book Award and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.

Ryan's awards include the 2004 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (The Poetry Foundation), a Guggenheim fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Award, an NEA Fellowship, the Union League Poetry Prize (Poetry Magazine), the Maurice English Poetry Award, and four Pushcart Prizes. She is currently a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Her work has been selected four times for The Best American Poetry and included in The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988-1997. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, The Yale Review, Paris Review, The American Scholar, The Threepenny Review, Parnassus, and many other journals and anthologies. Entertainment Weekly has named her to their "It List"; her work has been used in the funny papers; and one of her poems has been permanently installed at New York's Central Park Zoo. Ryan has shared the stage with Bill Moyers, and was recently featured in the "Literary Friendships" series of radio specials hosted by Garrison Keillor. She was born in California and grew up in the small towns of the San Joaquin Valley and the Mojave Desert. Since l971 she has lived in Marin County.

Ryan’s poems, she says, don't begin with a simple image or sound, but instead start, "the way an oyster does, with an aggravation." What she hopes to convey, however, is a sense of refreshment. "Poems should leave you feeling freer and not more burdened," Ryan says. "I like to think of all good poetry as providing more oxygen into the atmosphere; it just makes it easier to breathe."

ABOUT THE NIAGARA RIVER
The sixth collection of poetry from the winner of the 2004 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, The Niagara River (Grove Press), seems too brief and blithe to pack so much wallop. Intense and relaxed, buoyant and rueful, the off-kilter music of Kay Ryan's poetry galvanizes a rapidly widening audience. Kirkus Reviews calls Kay Ryan's work "full-brained poems in a largely half-brained world."

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