Currently Reading: Synthesizing Gravity by Kay Ryan 📚

I have loved a few of Kay Ryan’s poems for a time, but only recently have I read any of her poetry in bulk. (An awful word for poetry collections, I admit, but I’m not implying any sort of speed in reading them.) Then I found this collection of her essays and — between the poems and the prose, she has quickly become one of my favorite writers on the planet.

Writing about Marianne Moore’s poetry, Ryan remarks, “She commonly looks at something quite remote and rustic … and it explodes in a variety of alarming directions.”

“Yet in another way,” she says, “observation is just the detonator for an explosion of private associations, glittering in their rhetorical arcs, and upon there descent into the reader’s brainpan randomly meaningful and meaningless.”

I love reading, love all the glittering, meaningful and meaningless rehetorical arcs.