Erratic Facts

Book excerpt: “Clear and lucid” poems from a US Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner who “journeys through the landscape of memory, consciousness, loss, and love” (The Washington Post). Kay Ryan is acclaimed for her highly relatable, deeply insightful poems. Erratic Facts is her first new collection since the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Best of It, and it is animated with her signature swift, clearheaded, lyrical style. At once witty and melancholy, playful and heartfelt, Ryan examines enormous subjects—existence, consciousness, love, loss—in compact poems that have immensely powerful resonance. Her sly rhymes and strong cadences convey both musicality and wisdom. While these pieces are composed of the same brevity and vitality that have characterized her singular voice over the course of more than twenty years, her imagination is more eccentric and daring than ever. Erratic Facts solidifies Ryan’s place at the pinnacle of American poetry. “Read a poem once and take in its crisp rhythms, subtle rhymes, and arresting images. Read it again and detect its hide-and-seek metaphors and meanings. . . . [Ryan’s] quantum poems pose resonant questions of physics and metaphysics, of attentiveness and caring on scales intimate and universal.” —Booklist