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Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose

Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose

by Kay Ryan

Grove Press ·2020 ·208 pages
Near the Top
Near the Top
I Index
71/99
Near the Top

66/99

Critics' Rating Index

Top of the Pile

76/99

Readers' Rating Index

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Scholars' Citation Index

34/99

Volume of Reviews

14/99

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About This Book

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 A bracing collection of critical prose, book reviews, and her private previously unpublished soundings of poems and poets-- including Robert Frost, Stevie Smith, Marianne Moore, William Bronk, and Emily Dickinson-- Synthesizing Gravity bristles with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 an American master.


Reviews

"For anyone who's ever attended the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) annual conference, Ryan's gimlet-eyed account of the 2005 event in Vancouver will be a revelation ..."

Harvey Freedenberg· Shelf Awareness Read review ↗ Near the Top

"...a brilliant essay collection."

Publishers Weekly Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"The essays and reviews in Ryan's...first prose collection reveal a careful poet who's also careful not to take her job too seriously."

Kirkus Read review ↗ Near the Top

"Yet if Ryan gives us a view through a keyhole, it's a view often made richer by its constraints."

David Orr· The New York Times Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

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