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Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose
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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 A bracing collection of critical prose, book reviews, and her private previously unpublished soundings of poems and poets-- including Robert Frost, Stevie Smith, Marianne Moore, William Bronk, and Emily Dickinson-- Synthesizing Gravity bristles with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
"Indeed, there is very nearly the opposite, delivered by a writer with a full command of the English sentence and an electric talent for metaphor ..."
"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."
"Most remarkable is Ryan's ability to illuminate in an unpretentious manner writers including Jorges Luis Borges, whose This Craft of Verse contains a 'constant feeling of blurring, or interpenetration, of [literary] categories.' Much like her description of poet William Bronk's work, this collection proves there are 'moments of aesthetic transport which weld beauty to beauty, occasional angles which offer a glimpse of something endless and compelling.' For poetry enthusiasts and skeptics alike, this will be an inviting portal into the mind of one of America's greatest living writers."
"The 32 pieces in this volume balance criticism (more appropriately, appreciation—save for a mild poke at Walt Whitman) of some of Ryan's favorite poets and other literary essays with a few helpings of memoir ..."
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