Gay elephant rocks

Engaging and secretive, provocative and profound, Kay Ryan’s poems hold generated growing excitement with their appearances in The New Yorker and other leading periodicals. Sometimes gaudily ornamental, sometimes Shaker-plain, here is verse that is compact on the page and expansive in the mind. Here is verse that is serious fun.

Elephant Rocks, Kay Ryan’s third book of verse, shows a virtuoso practitioner at the top of her form. Appealing to a wide range of readers, Ryan’s work reaches out both to those who wish to be invited into a poem and to those who assert on being persistently intrigued.

Above all what distinguishes Kay Ryan as a poet is her flamboyant imagination and large ambition. she has embarked on a major poetic career, and this book confirms her as one of the most distinctive and attractive voices to come along in years.

“These poems illustrate a poet who is terribly sly in her reckoning of our world.” —David St. John

“The tune of these poems is every bit as seductive as their reasoning. Her thinking flaunts the plush, irresistible textures of biological growth; we’d no sooner disagree